By Timothy Williams | The New York Times | July 30, 2015

CHICAGO — Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia, who runs the sprawling Cook County Jail here, has an indelible childhood memory of police officers pounding on the aluminum walls of the family’s double-wide trailer home in North Carolina, rifling through cupboards and drawers, and arresting her father on charges of selling marijuana.

Dr. Jones Tapia, then 8, had to call her mother home from work.

Over the next several years, other relatives, including two brothers, and a number of friends also spent time in jail. She says she might have ended up there, too.

Instead, she became fascinated by psychology and earned a doctorate. She began working at Cook County Jail in 2006, and this spring became its unlikely warden when she was promoted to executive director — one of the first clinical psychologists to run a jail, underscoring how much the country’s prisons have become holding centers for the mentally ill.  Continue reading »

By Lisa Feldman Barrett and Jolie Wormwood | The New York Times Sunday Review | April 17, 2015

The Justice Department recently analyzed eight years of shootings by Philadelphia police officers. Its report contained two sobering statistics: Fifteen percent of those shot were unarmed; and in half of these cases, an officer reportedly misidentified a “nonthreatening object (e.g., a cellphone) or movement (e.g., tugging at the waistband)” as a weapon.

Many factors presumably contribute to such shootings, ranging from carelessness to unconscious bias to explicit racism, all of which have received considerable attention of late, and deservedly so.

But there is a lesser-known psychological phenomenon that might also explain some of these shootings. It’s called “affective realism”: the tendency of your feelings to influence what you see — not what you think you see, but the actual content of your perceptual experience. Continue reading »

By Nancy Gertner | The New York Times | March 30, 2015

Hon. Nancy Gertner, CLBB faculty member, former federal judge and Professor at Harvard Law School, participated in a dialogue on how forensic science can be made more dependable and professional in The New York Times Room for Debate column. Read the debate, “Judging Forensic Science,” here.

The National Commission on Forensic Science was formed in response to widespread concerns that forensic evidence that lacked any meaningful scientific basis was being regularly permitted in trials. The concerns were not just about the “expert” witnesses, but about the judges who, according to the National Academy of Sciences report that led to the commission’s creation, have been “utterly ineffective” in assessing the quality of research behind the evidence.

The evidence used to win convictions has often been based on bad science. In about half of the cases in which D.N.A. evidence led to exoneration, invalid or improper forensic science contributed to the wrongful conviction.

Appeals courts almost invariably affirm trial judges’ admission of evidence that has been challenged, unless the judge abused his or her discretion by, in the words of one ruling, making a decision that “no conscientious judge, acting intelligently, could honestly have taken.” That’s hardly a strict standard.

Sadly, judges are more likely to reject scientific evidence in civil cases, in which both sides can have substantial resources, and in which there is a discovery process that enables each side to find out about the other’s case far in advance of trial. In an arson case I presided over as a judge, I could find no criminal cases in which there had been a challenge to the admissibility of evidence from dogs who supposedly could sniff out fire-spreading fuels.

The national commission is doing more than exhorting judges to do the right thing, which sadly did not get very far. It is bringing together representatives of the Department of Justice, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, defense lawyers and experts to set standards for judges, and prosecutors, to follow. If the Justice Department doesn’t try to admit evidence of questionable validity, then state and local prosecutors may follow suit. That could go a long in solving the problems with forensic science.

Read Judge Gertner’s post originally published in The New York Times.

By Paul Sullivan | January 30, 2015 | The New York Times “Your Money” “Wealth Matters”

Midway through the film “Still Alice,” which tracks the growing grip of Alzheimer’s on a 50-something Columbia University professor, that professor, played by Julianne Moore, stands at a lectern to address an Alzheimer’s conference. She is holding a yellow highlighter and a copy of her speech.

She proceeds to talk about her struggles with the disease and how she never knows what will vanish from her memory and when. It’s a lucid, affecting talk, and the viewer would be hard pressed to know anything was wrong with her, if not for the highlighter. She uses it to track her every word so she doesn’t read the same sentence over and over again.

For anyone who has ever watched a family member disappear into Alzheimer’s, Ms. Moore’s performance is gripping, particularly as her tricks to stall her decline inevitably fail and the later stages of the disease consume her. Yet the movie is also a great vessel to explore many of the financial issues that families need to address when someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or any other disease that causes cognitive impairment.

Continue reading »

By Adam Liptak | The New York Times | December 12, 2014

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed to decide on Friday whether a decision it made in 2012 barring mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile killers must be applied retroactively.

The case concerns George Toca, a Louisiana man who was 17 in 1984 when, according to witnesses, he fatally shot a friend during a botched armed robbery. Mr. Toca was convicted of second-degree murder and automatically sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, as required by Louisiana law.

Continue reading »