Planning Does Not Equal Sanity

In theory, a criminal's intricate planning shouldn't rule out an in­sanity defense, says clinical psychologist William Carroll, a former de­fense lawyer who teaches at John Marshall Law School in Chicago.

“A person can be extremely intelligent and also crazy as hell”, Carrol says. “That's hard for a jury to understand.”

Chris Slobogin, a law and psychiatry professor at the Univer­sity of Florida, agrees. In the Unabomber case, however, “The plan­ning didn't just span a day or two, or a week. It spanned a multi-year period. It would be very difficult to argue that all of this be­havior was caused by psychosis.”

The Unabomber's seemingly political agenda also spells trou­ble for the defense. Mental illness can fuel political beliefs, but jurors who read the Unabomber manifesto will likely conclude that “while eccentric and perhaps dangerous, he is nonetheless rational, ” Slobogin says.

Jurors reached that conclusion last year in the trial of John Salvi III, an anti-abortion extremist who killed two workers at a Boston clinic.

Salvi's lawyers described him as a severely ill man who be­lieved he was battling an anti-Catholic conspiracy launched by the Mafia, the Freemasons and the Ku Klux Klan. A jury found him sane, however. He later killed himself in prison.

Jurors also distrust mental illness testimony at sentencing, Sundby says. But it can be more effective there because the legal standards are easier to meet.

At sentencing, jurors need only ask whether mental illness dis­torted the defendant's perceptions enough that he or she does not deserve to die, Sundby says. “It's more of a compassion issue.”

 

TEXT 22

 

Spatial Analysis of Crime Using GIS-Based Data: Weighted Spatial Adaptive Filtering and Chaotic Cellular Forecasting

With Applications to Street Level Drug Markets

Abstract

With the recent emphasis towards proactive Community Oriented Policing and the increase in the use of computerized information systems for data collection police departments are faced with two major problems: (1) how to mine the vast amounts of data produced by these systems, and (2) how to use this data to provide information that supports proactive law enforcement.

This dissertation makes a contribution in this area by providing the model specification and framework for such tools, a GIS-based data collection system, and a new spatio-temporal forecasting method – chaotic cellular forecasting (CCF) – for use by an early warning system for emerging drug markets.

Introduction

As police organizations automate their operations and implement more modern computer systems, taking advantage of advances in information technology such as open architecture database systems, enterprise wide computer applications and ever increasing microprocessor and network speeds, more and more information will become available to police officers at the click of a mouse button. Moreover, all of this information will be linked together from various sources and organized in ways which were previously unheard of. Police investigators will likely find this wealth of information a boon to their work, but crime analysts and police administrators may well find themselves faced with information overload.

At the same time that police departments are making increasing use of computer technology they are also undergoing a change in law enforcement philosophy. Evidence of this change can be seen in the fact that many police departments are implementing Community Oriented Policing (C.O.P.) in an effort to emphasize proactive rather than reactive law enforcement. While the concept of Community Oriented Policing is certainly not new (for a review of early C.O.P. initiatives see Trojanowicz, 1986) the way in which information is utilized in Community Oriented Policing has changed over the years. In many cities desktop personal computers have replaced the daily log for foot patrol officers and in some cities the time honored tradition of a notebook and pencil has given way to hand held, pen based mobile computers.

An abundance of tools and methodologies have been developed that support traditional reactive law enforcement. Practical examples include investigative tools such as linkage analysis, geographic offender profiling and modus operandi systems. Geographic information systems have also played a large role, both from a practical and a research perspective. Research examples include measuring the geographic displacement of drug offenders (Green, 1993), monitoring the effects of law enforcement strategies on nuisance bar activity (Cohen et al., 1993) and point pattern analysis of crime locations (Canter, 1993). Other examples of more general purpose crime mapping systems for law enforcement include the Drug Market Analysis Program (DMAP) effort undertaken in Jersey City, Hartford, San Diego, Pittsburgh and Kansas City (McEwen and Taxman, 1994; Maltz, 1993) and PA-LEGIS (Pennsylvania Law Enforcement Geographic Information System), an integrated GIS and police records management system developed for smaller police departments (Bookser, 1991).

There is no doubt that tools for reactive policing will always play an important role in law enforcement. However, proactive law enforcement will require an entirely new set of tools, the development of which has only just begun. Proactive problem solving by detectives, community oriented police officers and police officials not only requires access to up-to-date information on criminal activity, but perhaps more importantly the ability to anticipate emerging crime trends. This in turn requires the ability to mine the vast amounts of data produced on a daily basis by 911 and police record management systems, police hot line tips and citizen complaints for signs of impending flare-ups, geographic displacement or other unusual criminal activity. In other words, proactive law enforcement needs tools that can anticipate or provide early warning of criminal patterns so that they may be prevented.

This dissertation makes a contribution in this area by providing the model specification and framework, a GIS-based data collection system, and a new spatio-temporal forecasting method – chaotic cellular forecasting (CCF) – for use by an early warning system for emerging drug markets.

The second chapter focuses on the development of a geographic information system that provides the underlying data for the dissertation. This practical application of GIS to narcotics enforcement arose out of the Drug Market Analysis Program (DMAP) funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). A by-product of the DMAP program was a very accurate data set consisting of point (i.e., address) level data on illicit drug market activity and related crimes.

Chapter 3 is a study employing multiple regression techniques to analyze the effects of both traditional and ecological variables on illicit drug markets. The study was in part made possible due to the fact that DMAP includes high quality location data on ecological variables such as land use and the built environment.

Chapter 4 is an empirical study introducing weighted spatial adaptive filtering which provides evidence that spatial interaction, local context and spatially varying model parameters are important indicators of street level drug dealing.

The fifth chapter introduces chaotic cellular forecasting. CCF employs the findings of the previous chapters and combines chaos theory, artificial neural networks (ANN's) and grid cell aggregated GIS-based data to produce one-step-ahead forecasts of street level drug market activity. One of the underlying assumptions of CCF is that spatio-temporal patterns of criminal activity can be modeled as a chaotic system. Artificial neural networks, more specifically feedforward networks with backpropagation, are then used to estimate the forecasting model. Backpropagation models are uniquely qualified for this purpose because they are self adapting and are universal approximators (Hornik et al., 1989). Two versions of CCF, one using spatially constant weights (analogous to spatial regression using spatially constant parameters) and the other a hybrid model of spatially varying input to hidden unit weights and constant hidden to output units weights are tested. The results are compared to both a simple and a state-of-the art spatial regression model using spatially lagged variables and tested for forecast accuracy on a holdout data sample.

The sixth and final chapter provides a summary and outlines future work.

 

TEXT 23

 

Estate in English law

In 1925, several laws were passed in England in an attempt to simplify the system of holding and transferring land. These laws recognized two estates in land. An estate is a right to possess land for a defined period of time, and the two estates recognized are (i) " fee simple absolute in possession" and (ii) " term of years absolute." The first means that the landholder owns the land throughout his life unless he sells or gives it to someone else. Eventually, this land will pass to his heirs (people entitled to the property of someone after he dies: see previous chapter). The second is a right to hold land for a certain fixed period, after whichthe land returns to the holder of the estate " absolute in possession."

We often call the first estate a freehold and the second a leasehold, or lease. All land is ultimately held by a freeholder, but sometimes it is the freeholder who is using the land, and sometimes it is a leaseholder. In England a majority of people living in houses own the freehold, but people living in apartments usually own a lease. When they buy an apartment they will want to buy as long a lease as possible from the freeholder – for example, 99 years. Often the leaseholder (or lessee) has the right to sell his lease to someone else, but of course he can only sell the right to use the land for the number of years remaining on the lease. Until the lease ends, he has the right to possess the land exclusively: even the freeholder has no right to enter the land without the leaseholder's permission. However, the contract he signed with the freeholder will require him to fulfill certain obligations, such as paying rent (ground rent) and keeping buildings in a good condition. The obligations, or covenants, which the leaseholder and freeholder owe to each other can be very complicated. For example, they must decide who is to pay if expensive repairs need to be done. Even a 99 year lease could be ended (forfeited) if the lessee breaks an important agreement such as rent payment.

It seems likely that the leasehold system for owning an apartment will be changed in the near future. In other countries which inherited the English system of law, apartment owners usually hold a commonhold —a share in the freehold of the land on which the whole apartment building stands. This system is similar to the way apartments are owned in continental-law countries and enables an owner to sell his apartment without the worry that his lease is too short.

Legal interests

As well as these two estates, or ways of holding your land, English law since 1925 has recognized four legal interests over land held by someone else. The first is an easement, such as a neighbor's right to use a footpath over your land, or your right not to have buildings or trees on your land block light to his windows. The second is a rent-charge – someone's right to charge a landholder a periodical sum of money. The third is a legal mortgage – an interest in property given as a form of security to someone who has lent the landholder money. If the money is repaid the interest ends. However, if the landholder fails to pay his debt by a certain time, the money-lender, or mortgagee, may have the right to take the property from the borrower, or mortgagor. Mortgages are very important in land law because when most people buy an initial house or apartment they have to borrow a lot of money from a mortgagee such as a bank or a building society. The last legal interest is a right of entry. The right of a freeholder to enter a lessee's property if he fails to pay rent is an example of a right of entry.

 

Land transfer

 

Someone who buys land needs to know exactly what rights and obligations are attached to the land. Although it is possible to deal directly with the seller, most people employ a solicitor to handle the complicated business of land transfer, known as conveyancing. In fact, even after the simplifications of 1925, which reduced the system to two kinds of legal estate and four kinds of legal interest, there still exist many kinds of " equitable" interest (see previous chapter) which the buyer and seller need to know about. For example, even if the freehold you want to buy is registered in the name of only one person, you should make sure the spouse of the freeholder does not have the right to continue living in the property after it has been sold!

When investigating the rights attached to land, solicitors used to examine title deeds — documents recording transfers of the property over many years. In Britain there is now a land registry which makes investigation of title easier because it is a central register describing the land, the landholder, and third party rights. However, not all land in Britain has yet been recorded on the register, and there are some land rights which need not be recorded there. Even if land has been registered, the solicitor still has many things to check, such as possible plans of the local council to build noisy roads near the house. Any mistakes he makes could cost the buyer a lot of money. Conveyancing is one of the areas in which solicitors sometimes get sued by clients.

 

Short-term possession

 

Another important area of land law concerns types of possession for shorter and less secure terms than freeholds and leases – for example, where a person living in property pays money to a landlord every week in return for permission to live there. The landlord is usually the freeholder or the leaseholder of the property, but sometimes he himself is paying rent to someone else. Sometimes it is not easy to decide whether a tenancy is a lease or only a license. Generally, a licensee does not have as much security as a lessee. For example, if he fails to pay the rent, his landlord may be able to repossess the property more easily and more quickly than a freeholder can get his land back from a leaseholder. However, many legal systems have laws to protect such land-users. In Britain, for example, the Landlord and Tenant Act requires landlords to give certain periods of warning to tenants if they want to repossess their property, and it provides means for tenants to negotiate a reasonable period of time in which to pay rent arrears (over due rent). Under the 1988 Housing Act, there are Rent Tribunals which sometimes have the power to reduce rents which they consider too high. There are also special laws concerning tenants who rent land in order to run a business. Usually, however, there is greater protection for someone who rents land to live on.

 

TEXT 24

 

" Miranda" Rights and the Fifth Amendment

What are the " Miranda" Rights?

In1966, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the historic case of Miranda v. Arizona, declaring that whenever a person is taken into police custody, before being questioned he or she must be told of the Fifth Amendment right not to make any self-incriminating statements. As a result of Miranda, anyone in police custody must be told four things before being questioned:

1. You have the right to remain silent.

2. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.

3. You have the right to an attorney.

4. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.

 

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