9-9-2008 California:
Tougher sex offender laws have turned into a major payday for psychologists and psychiatrists in the state. Documents uncovered by the LA Times reveal the state is paying some medical professionals close to a million dollars or more to perform sex offender evaluations. A Bakersfield psychologist is among the state's highest paid.
A few months ago, 17 News reported on how local sex offenders are evaluated and put into therapy programs in Bakersfield. Now we learn how profitable it has come for many private psychiatrists and pyschologists.
The state's highest paid evaluator made close to $1.2 million last year in payments from the state. The Times reports that Bakersfield Psychologist, Michael Musacco also made the top ten list at more than $800,000.
Musacco works out of an office on California Ave. He says the state is scaling back. This year, he did only a fraction of the sex offender evaluations.
It all goes back to Jessica's Law, which voters passed in 2006. The law required thousands of additional sex offenders be evaluated for potential hospitalization after being released from prison.
The state mental health department calls this a crisis, saying it went from fifty sex offenders needing to be evaluated each month to 750.
"Certainly, I think more money was spent last year than was necessary because of the Jessica's law thing," said Musacco. He added that Jessica's Law uses resources that could go elsewhere, like treatment.
Other therapists say the law lumps offenders together regardless of the severity of their crime and places unproven restrictions on where offenders can live. "If you are going to make laws, make them for something that works, not fear," said Sex Offender Therapist Carol Atkinson in an April 7 interview. ..News Source.. by KGET.com
September 9, 2008
CA- Psychiatrists and psychologists well paid because of Jessica's Law
August 20, 2008
CA- What Jessica's Law demands
8-20-2008 California:
As a California psychologist in private practice, I have concerns about The Times' depiction of billing by evaluators of sex offenders in the article, "Jessica’s Law pays dividend for some.” I do not do these specific evaluations, but I feel the need to correct misapprehensions the public may have after reading the article. I do not wish to defend what may be predatory billing in some cases, but I do wish to clarify the several factors not mentioned in the article that may cause high billing amounts.
First, work may have been done in a time period not reflected by the date of the bill. A single bill may include many evaluations conducted over months or even years.
Second, the hours spent on an evaluation depend on the complexity of the case and the number of medical and legal records to be reviewed. Sometimes these number in the hundreds, running to many inches and even feet of stacked paper. Reading -- and not merely scanning -- such documents can take hours.
Third, any psychological evaluation of an offender is complex and requires skill. The purpose is to predict what a felon will do in the future and how serious any future offenses may be. For example, will the offender download pictures of young girls onto his computer, or will he kidnap and rape? The psychologist or psychiatrist has a serious job that combines science, art and intuition.
What the article does not present is an objective perspective of the "typical" evaluation. How long does a typical sex offender evaluation session last? (A statistical average would be helpful indicator.) How long does an evaluator take to review records? (Again, a statistical average is the best indicator.) How long does a typical evaluator take to write a report? Such a task involves the selection and exposition of the salient facts of a case; it involves ruminating about a sex offender's "state of mind" (going by the known facts and professional expertise); it also involves making a cogent argument for a "thumbs-up or thumbs-down" decision often required by law. All opinions and judgments need to be well-argued and supported by facts because the evaluator may be called into court to defend his or her report. This effort is not reflected simply in the number of pages of a report but in the quality of the content -- and the hours spent doing an evaluation.
If the public has required the government to protect us from violent sexual predators by some form of incarceration beyond the sentences served, due process demands careful assessment of future risk. The behavioral science behind such prediction does not allow the precision that is accepted in medical science. The spectacular advances in neuroscience have not produced simple markers in brain scans to identify potential sex offenders -- or any other kind of offenders. Psychological testing is much slower than brain scanning -- and more uncertain. The greater the consequences of a false prediction of a sex offender's likelihood to re-offend and the greater the intuitive uncertainty (especially in borderline cases), the more thorough and longer an evaluation should be.
The Times presents cases of seemingly excessive billing by some evaluating psychologists and psychiatrists, but the reader is left in the dark regarding the circumstances. There is no attempt to inform the reader as to the procedures for billing and payment, the specialized expertise of evaluators involved and the nature of managerial scrutiny and approval. I hope The Times will continue its investigations of Jessica's Law in a more balanced and enlightening fashion. Otherwise, this article can be read as a shotgun smearing of my profession. ..Source.. by Philip Kaushall who is a clinical and forensic psychologist who lives in San Diego.
July 10, 2008
CA- Supreme Court to Determine Constitutionality of ‘Jessica’s Law’
The headline of this post is a bit misleading in that, the court will determine only one facet of Jessica's law as implemented in California, it is with respect to civil commitment.
7-10-2008 California:
The California Supreme Court agreed yesterday to decide whether a popular law that allows sexually violent predators to be confined indefinitely is constitutional.
At their weekly conference in San Francisco, the justices voted 5-2, with Justices Ming Chin and Marvin Baxter in the minority, to grant the defendant’s petition for review in People v. Mckee,160 Cal.App.4th 1517. The Fourth District Court of Appeal’s Div. One ruled March 20 that the statute does not violate the Due Process, Equal Protection, or Ex Post Facto clauses.
Affirming the decision of San Diego Superior Court Judge Peter L. Gallagher, Div. One upheld the constitutionality of “Jessica’s Law,” enacted by an overwhelming majority of the voters as Proposition 83. The 2006 measure provides in part that an individual committed under the Sexually Violent Predator Act will remain in custody until he can prove that he no longer suffers from a mental illness that predisposes him to commit sex crimes.
Under prior law, a sexually violent predator who had completed his sentence could only be recommitted for two years at a time.
The defendant in the case considered by the justices yesterday, Richard McKee, was involuntarily committed to the custody of the State Department of Mental Health for an indeterminate term in March 2007.
Jessica’s Law is named after Jessica Lunsford, a 9-year old Florida girl who was raped and murdered in February 2005 by John Couey, a previously convicted sex offender. In addition to providing for indefinite commitments, it changed the definition of a sexually violent predator by permitting an offender to be so designated on the basis of a single conviction of a violent sex crime.
Proposition 83 did not change the requirement that the prerequisites for commitment be proved at trial beyond a reasonable doubt, or the act’s requirement that the offender bear the burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that he is entitled to conditional release for one year and subsequent unconditional discharge after that one-year conditional release.
McKee claimed the act’s release provisions were inadequate to ensure that only those persons with a current mental illness that makes them dangerous to the public continue to be confined.
Citing Jones v. United States (1983) 463 U.S. 354, which held that the application of a standard of proof by a preponderance of the evidence did not violate the due process at an initial hearing regarding the civil commitment of a person previously found not guilty of committing a criminal offense by reason of insanity, the court concluded that an SVP’s initial indefinite civil commitment pursuant to the amended act did not violate due process because McKee’s mental illness and dangerousness were proved beyond a reasonable doubt, an even higher standard of proof.
The court also did not find any due process issue with the potential length of an indefinite civil commitment, noting that the inmate could still petition for review or release based on an alleged change in his status.
Also, because the act provides measure for the release of committed persons, the indeterminate term does not indicate that the amended act is now punitive, Justice Alex McDonald reasoned, because the term’s duration “is linked not to punishment, but to its stated purpose of treating the committed person and protecting the public.”
Pursuant to the California Supreme Court’s opinion in Hubbart v. Superior Court (1999) 19 Cal.4th 1138, which rejected the ex post facto challenge to the pre-Proposition 83 version of the act, the court concluded that the act, as amended, did not implicate any ex port facto concerns either.
The court also held that the amended act did not violate equal protection because it treats mentally disordered defendants civilly committed under Penal Code Sec. 2960 and persons found not guilty by reason of insanity and civilly committed under Penal Code Sec. 1026. ..News Source.. by Metropolitan News Company
