Chris and Alison speak with James Clark, Professor and Dean of the College of Social Work at Florida State University. You can review his impressive vita on the FSU COSW website here. Dean Clark is a forensic social worker and you can learn about the role of mitigation (and social workers), in the book he edited with Edward Monahan: Tell the Client's Story, Mitigation in Criminal and Death Penalty Cases.
Our conversation ran long and was too fascinating to edit down to just one episode. Accordingly, this is the first of two episodes where we have a conversation with Dean Clark.
These conversations are not appropriate for children. People with their own traumatic histories should be aware that we discuss violent crimes, exploitation, sexual trauma, child abuse, and incarceration.
Chris and Alison speak with James Clark, Professor and Dean of the College of Social Work at Florida State University. You can review his impressive vita on the FSU COSW website here. Dean Clark is a forensic social worker and you can learn about the role of mitigation (and social workers), in the book he edited with Edward Monahan: Tell the Client's Story, Mitigation in Criminal and Death Penalty Cases.
Our conversation ran long and was too fascinating to edit down to just one episode. Accordingly, this is the first of two episodes where we have a conversation with Dean Clark.
These conversations are not appropriate for children. People with their own traumatic histories should be aware that we discuss violent crimes, exploitation, sexual trauma, child abuse, and incarceration.
Clark_Transcript.mp3
Alison DeBelder [00:00:04] This is trauma injustice. This is a podcast about the ways that people confront and manage trauma in the justice system. These conversations touched on seriously troubling topics. This podcast is not appropriate for children. People with their own traumatic histories should be aware that we discuss violent crimes, exploitation, sexual trauma, child abuse and incarceration.
Chris Moser [00:00:28] I'm Chris Moser.
Alison DeBelder [00:00:30] Hey, folks, Alison here. Just wanted to let you know that we've done it again. We've created another two part episode. Our conversation ran long and there really just was so much that was valuable in it. We didn't want to force it into a one hour episode. Hope you enjoy this, and we'll be back next week with part two. Our guest today is James Clark, dean and professor at the Florida State University College of Social Work. Dean Clark received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and his MSW from the University of Kentucky. He has published books, social work ethics treatment manual for rural substance abuse. Tell the Client Story Mitigation in criminal and death penalty cases, which I'm holding up right now. It's on my desk, in my office. He has authored many book chapters in peer reviewed papers. He specializes in forensic social work, including legal and ethical issues and trauma informed translational research, which, if I'm not mistaken, means really finding ways to apply insights from research into real world clinical applications. His full CV is available on the Florida State University College of Social Work website. Welcome, Dean Clark. Thank you for being here.
Jim Clark [00:01:53] Thanks for having me.
Alison DeBelder [00:01:55] What is forensic social work?
Jim Clark [00:01:58] Forensic social work is a field of practice and study in which it's at the intersection of practice, in the area of clinical social work and other types of social work, practice and the law. Forensic social work, the way I look at it, is especially concerned with how clinical practitioners work in the court system and the criminal justice and civil justice systems. What many of us in the field have been trying to do is to understand something that has been going on for a long time and to begin to theorize around it and to also develop empirical approaches to understanding. So forensic social work, broadly speaking beyond the practice realm, also can impact program development and policy development and conceptualization around that and also empirical studies of that. It's highly an interdisciplinary field because we work very closely with attorneys and other law professionals, judges, people who are involved in the justice system in the justice system is extraordinarily into professional, interdisciplinary. It creates all kinds of very interesting possibilities for dialog and developing new ideas and also working together to test approaches that could be more just and effective for clients.
Alison DeBelder [00:03:37] I have a broader question about social work and trauma. I've said it before. I'll never stop saying it. If you want to meet truly good hearted, lovely, optimistic, well-intentioned people, you have got to go and find yourself a social work student. Social work students are a joy and too late, and I miss teaching them since they haven't been teaching them, I learned so much from so many of them. I got to know my students and I know that there are for sure people who are attracted to social work because of. Help that they ran into as a result of trauma that they experienced in their life. Right. I think probably all helping professions, if you just talked to enough of the people that get into them, it's because they have past trauma and they seek to be a helpful force in maybe ways that they needed and didn't get or in ways that they received help. How can people balance that their own traumatic histories with going into a helping profession like social work? And can it be a strength?
Jim Clark [00:04:49] That's a crucial question for social work. The analogous question for law, which is what I like to do always when I'm talking with wonderful lawyers like yourselves is to say what's the analogy and law? The philosopher Paul Ridker once said that our obsession with justice is rooted in our experiences of personal injustice. That usually happens as a small child. Where you have learned some kind of moral or code or some you got to either intuitively or you've you're actually being subjected to a moral code and you watch it violated sometimes over and over again. And some of the great lawyers will tell you that that's why they're in law school. Because this happened to me and I saw this happen, it was appalling and hypocritical and callous. And so I think I see the lot in with our social work students. Many of them do have histories of child and adolescent traumatic exposures, some very severe and intense. Many have had experiences where they've seen this roll out in their families and their friends and siblings and cousins and people they care about. The thing to understand is, and I know you, you do. Is that just like injustice, traumatic exposure as ubiquitous. So this idea of a student coming with zero exposure to traumatic or stress, and that doesn't mean they have PTSD when they hit the door, most do not. But it's so ubiquitous and it underlies every aspect of our lives in American society and across the globe that that is the norm. We are in denial as a society and to some ways as a intellectual class that that is the norm and that things like health and peace and others are not the norm. And I know that's going to sound terrible to a lot of people, I'm a very positive person. I know there's tremendous numbers of families and people that are raising healthy children.
Alison DeBelder [00:06:58] No, but that fantasy can be even more damaging. I would say to because not only are people walking around with the weight of their traumatic histories, but then they're fed the lie that it's supposed to be peace and tranquility. And so they're somehow other for not living this tranquil experience.
Jim Clark [00:07:22] That's right, and this is where shame is introduced, right? We can't talk about it. Let's make this concrete. We look at the epidemic of addiction of opioid addiction, substance use, alcoholism, which is still the most significant form of addiction and substance use. It's ubiquitous. Those phenomena we know drive violence and maltreatment neglect. Again, we don't want to make the error that every child or adolescent is exposed to this are walking around with PTSD because they're not. We're talking properly about, you know, general population 10 to 11 percent presence of PTSD. Interestingly enough, more high end to end women who tend to come into social work. And I believe it would be fair to say public defender work.
Alison DeBelder [00:08:11] I think that's right.
Jim Clark [00:08:12] Who are targeted, but also often the caregivers and families for people that are suffering from these types of disorders and mental illness comorbid with substance use. So whether you've been touched directly, if you bend, for example, sexually abused as a child, you enter therapy. If you're lucky, you'll get a compassionate clinical social worker who helps with the healing process and then you want to go into social work. That's not an unusual story. But there are many, many other people that are in there because of addiction issues in their families. And for me personally, it was more about poverty and working in Appalachia as a young man and just seeing the grinding poverty in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky in Appalachia that was happening with children that I'd show up in homes and children were huddled around a really old potbelly stove, literally an early 1980s. And they were freezing and they didn't have enough food and their roof was leaking and their parents were. You know who are wants, those children who are now grown up were unable to really connect and take care of their kids. And that moved me so deeply and terrified me. I still, as you can tell and talking about it, I've never gotten over it.
Alison DeBelder [00:09:31] How did you end up getting to that work? What did your parents do for a living? How did you end up choosing this path?
Jim Clark [00:09:40] My father worked for IBM, he was a wonderful writer, editor, artist, and he was involved with IBM and Endicott New York when IBM was beginning to become a major multinational company. And he wrote and oversaw the publication of the manuals to install those huge mainframes. You know that we have in a phone now used to be take a building to house it. But he grew up poor. He grew up in a family that was plagued with alcoholism. He was a wonderful kid. But he had limited parents. You know, it was limited in parenting he received. And he talked about that and made a great life with my mother, who worked in offices as a secretary for years and then stayed at home. I think what got me into the work was the great social justice mission of the Catholic Church. I was growing up in the 70s post Vatican two, when I think everybody thought that the world was going to change, the church was going to change and that social justice would be a way of living out the gospel. So I got involved with teachers that were like that and ended up doing what we used to call mission trips into Eastern Kentucky and Virginia during the summer for a week or two. The people of Appalachia, though, were the ones that captured my heart because they were so talented in their culture in terms of music and storytelling. And once they got to know you, they were so generous and so open. I would go into homes and they'd hardly have anything to eat and you'd sit down and they would demand that you share what they had. And it reminded me very much of probably what the Gospels were about, which was the preferential option for the poor because the poor teach us. I also realized there was a certain romantic notion around that, too, because there are many poor people that were plagued by trauma and violence and substance use. But I formed a commitment I'd say probably by the time I was in my first year or two of college. And then the second great influence was the work of a child psychiatrist named Robert Coles. Collins, who was teaching at Harvard at the time but had participated in civil rights and was writing books about poverty in America, children in America. He wrote incredible biographical work about Erick Erickson and Walker Percy, and on a Freudian. I was reading voraciously his work and saw how you could take a life, take on the big questions, moral ethical questions and try to live those out through becoming a professional. So for me that it was should it be the law or should it be something else in college, most of college, I was leaning toward the law, but then I spent a year after college working full time in West Virginia, and I decided that I really wanted to get more involved in the clinical social work aspects of the lives of children and the treatment. And the approach is to make families lives better, to help parents become more confident in their ability to to take care of their children and also to rail against to try to create social reform. That's how I got involved.
Alison DeBelder [00:12:54] I'm wondering if you might tell us about Eugene Gall Jr.. And how you met him and became involved in his case.
Jim Clark [00:13:08] Back in the 1980s, I was a young clinician. I was not involved in any type of forensics. In fact, I had made a commitment to stay out of court with the advice of many of my teachers to say that's the worst place for a social worker to end up. One day I got a call from a colleague of mine, Beth Roth, who taught with me at the University of Kentucky and said I am working with this amazing lawyer named Ed Monahan, who is the head of education for the Department of Public Advocacy in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. And I was supposed to go do this job interviewing, showing people how to interview new lawyers, how to interview clients. I got the flu and I told ED, you'd be over to help. And I said, Oh, great. And I said, I don't know anything about interviewing clients in the criminal justice system, and I don't know what public advocacy really is. And I've heard of it, but I don't know any public advocates or public defenders. So thanks a lot. But I had to run over there because it was about four hours later that the thing was going to happen. When I got there, I met Ed and those of, you know, Ed Monahan. He's just an amazing educator and an amazing man who ultimately became the chief public defender in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and led that organization with great distinction for many years. But back then, he was part of a group of young Turks that included Ernie Lewis, who was his main Confederate at the time, and they were determined to change the nature of criminal justice, public defending in terms of training, education. But also they were very, very intrigued by could the involvement of mental health, types of evaluation and approaches that transcended the usual psychiatric diagnostic approaches? Could that make an impact? So I arrived at the public advocate office and Ed, who is quite taciturn and soft-spoken, just ushered me in a room full of attorneys, and I realized that he had designed a fishbowl exercise. And sitting in the middle of the fishbowl next to an empty chair, which is designated for me was actual inmate who is in the last stages of release, who is working at the agency, and he was going to role play an issue. He was going to role play a client facing a public defender and I was to role play a public defender. But of course, I wasn't a public defender, so I had to sit down and just do what I normally do when I talk to people is have a conversation and try to use a lot of active listening and which you listen intensely and you reflect back what people are telling you and you. Sometimes when you reflect back, you ask a question or you make a statement that tries to go a little deeper into what people are saying to you, because people say an awful lot in those sentences they use and there's a lot to unpack, which takes intensive listening. So I did that, we role played a problem and then add who is merciless and striving for effectiveness began to ask everybody in the room what they thought of my work, which is also a relatively new experience at that public vein. And everybody, as you know, lawyers, have many different comments and they're not shy to present them. So some people really liked it. Some people said, Well, what's the point of all this listening? You got to get in and you got to get out, you know? And Dr. Clarke doesn't really seem to understand the constraints were under. But then others were intrigued by the reaction of the young man who I was interviewing, and then Ed got around and said, Well, it's like that for you. And he said, You know, I've never had a conversation like this before. And I wonder if if I could talk about a real problem that I have that I'm facing upon release. And I said I was willing to do that, but I said, do you want to do that privately if it's a personal problem? And he said, No, let's do it here. This is a problem that a lot of my friends have. And basically he was struggling with the fact that he was about to be returned into the community and he had become alienated or distant from his daughter and his ex-wife's family. And he desperately wanted to have relationships with people, but he wasn't sure how to go about repairing those relationships. So we began to have a conversation about that. And that ad, of course, did the same thing and said, What did you all think of that? And everybody was speechless, including myself, because we so admired this young man for talking about something so very personal and so very real in a training environment. So after that ad got its hooks into me and those of you that know ad, no, once he gets his hooks into you, they never are released. And he said, Look, I want you to do more training. And he said, I've got a client I'd like you to see. We're really puzzled. Ernie Lewis and I've been, you know, are defending him on appeal and we're trying to figure out what's going on. It's a very complicated case. And I said, Well, I'm glad to come back and do what I did today, but I don't know anything about forensic work. And to be honest with you, getting involved with a serial sex offender who has a long history of sex crimes and then has now committed homicides against children. I spent my whole life working to advocate for children and protection of children, and now you're asking me to do this. And so I left, and then Ed began to call me and say, Look, don't you think the best way to protect children is to understand the people that are harming them? And that was unimpeachable logic. And plus I began to really like add because I really felt he was up to something really important at dpa.
Alison DeBelder [00:19:18] When you say that you weren't advocating for children. My understanding is that the work that you had been doing up to that point and the research that you had been doing was working with traumatized kids, right?
Jim Clark [00:19:30] That's right. I was involved with Catholic social services, doing clinical work with kids who were victims of child maltreatment.
Alison DeBelder [00:19:38] What year was this?
Jim Clark [00:19:39] This would have been in 1985, 1986, about a thousand years ago in contemporary terms. And the other thing I will mention is that I was also involved as a clinician working and Catholic Charities, and I was director of the Lexington office. I was beginning to realize that all was not well with the Catholic Church in terms of children and abuse. I was involved in a terrible case in which a parishioner, a very powerful parishioner in a rural eastern Kentucky parish, had been abusing a number of children in that parish. The parents came and spoke with me, and they were terribly frightened to report this. But as a social work professional and as a Catholic at the time, I saw no conflict between following the law and carrying a great deal about the health of the Catholic Church, and I found out that my position might be not a majority position in the church. And this unspooled a tremendous scandal in the dioceses that I found myself in the middle of in my middle 20s that I was ill prepared to handle. The parish priest that was involved was very protective of the perpetrator. The parents were very angry at me because they had been marginalized by their community. But I spoke with some of the children and I began to read and as the investigation unfolded in that area that rural town and I followed the trial very closely, I realized this is a man who had been abusing children for decades and getting away with it and was a pillar of the community. The whole thing blew up, I ended up ultimately supported by my boss, a guy named Bill Murty's, who was a wonderful priest. But I was looked at by the administration and the bishop's office with a lot of skepticism and probably a lot more irritation that I realized at the time, I was still pretty blissfully ignorant that this was a snake pit. And I had no idea, of course, that this was something that was. We know now. You know it retrospect what was going on, but I was only beginning to understand or discover some of what was going on.
Alison DeBelder [00:21:57] And that's a perfect example, I know I talked to my students in the College of Social Work about making the decisions about how you will conduct yourself in difficult situations in advance of finding yourself in difficult situations and it'll make things a whole lot easier won't make things easy. But if you're committed to your principles beforehand before you're in the midst of them, it can make things more straightforward. So Ed Monahan, right, had you in his clutches and now had asked you to take a look at Eugene GOL's case or to meet with him? How did that work? Yes.
Jim Clark [00:22:38] This actually took a couple of years to happen because I was pretty scared and pretty stubborn, and I was busy, as you can tell with my own problems. But ultimately, it ended up that I left Catholic Charities and I started my doctor work at the University of Chicago. And there was also a lot of funding becoming available for those federal death penalty centers that were set up around the country in the 1990s early '90s. As a way of really trying to demonstrate that if we're going to have capital punishment in this country, then we better make sure that we've left no mitigation stone unturned. And that was the theory around this funding. So Ed connected me with them, and Ernie Lewis and Ed were the co-counsel on the case, and we all drove to Eddie Vale, which is the Kentucky State Penitentiary, which is also known ominously as the castle, which is a huge exactly what it sounds like. It looks like a medieval castle built on the precipice, on a cliff overlooking a lake, an enormous manmade lake and underneath that lake is a flooded town. So it's a very, very dramatic setting. So Ed and Ernie and I went to death row and I talked with Mr. Gaul and I had read, of course, a great deal of materials that at it provided me. So I remember meeting him and interviewing him, and it was very, very clear that he, in my estimation, suffered from some serious brain damage. The way he spoke, the way he walked, the way his face was asymmetrical. There was just a lot of clinical signs. I remember having that interview. And Mr. Gore was very forthcoming about everything that happened or was not trying to give any excuses about anything yet. It was very clear that he was driven by incredible sexual compulsion and continue to be even on death row.
Alison DeBelder [00:24:41] Can you tell the listeners what he was accused of?
Jim Clark [00:24:45] He had served time for raping an adult woman, was released from prison, came back and started working in Ohio, had a family, even a child. And ended up on a rampage. I learned ultimately that he had on weekends gone about raping a college students and teenagers dressed in fake police gear with fake police equipment that he had his car fitted out. And he began to escalate in doing this. He also had a gun, a fake gun, and he would pull young women over. And with this gun threatened women and take one of the girls he would cruise around colleges and pick up girls or pull them over with his flashing lights like he was a cop and and then take one of the girls out of the car and drive them or drive them away and rape them. Ultimately, he fell apart one day, coming back from the grocery and jumped over three fences. He had seen a woman get out of a car, a young woman, and he attempted to rape her and he was arrested. He was spiraling out of control what he was ultimately accused in capital crimes was was raping two children across the state line. He was in southern Ohio, which is separated from northern Kentucky by the Ohio River. Ended up killing two girls and after sexually assaulting them and then was captured by the police, he was basically a person that had gone to a point where he was had totally escalated out of control and wasn't even doing things in a planful way like he had previously done to hide his crimes. So that was very interesting to me that no one, the compulsion was so profound and escalating. And then the fact that these crimes were basically in some ways, I would say, suicidal in their nature and that they were not planned and they were they were out of control.
Chris Moser [00:26:52] Did he express any remorse?
Jim Clark [00:26:54] You recall he recognized what he did was wrong and a recognized that he had caused harm. And I think there were some part of him that felt badly about it, but he did not express remorse. That was a great question because he didn't not express remorse in a sociopathic way, which would be. These are people that got in my way. You know, there women are there for me to use. Children are perfectly acceptable. I have every right to do what I want. That would be more of the, you know, sociopathic or probably more psychopathic approach. He seemed incapable of touching base with a normal emotional response for anything. His responses were superficial and his insight was very rudimentary. So it felt like I was talking with more of a young teenager who was just grappling with emotions that he didn't understand. You know, he'd been through the court system a great deal so he could parent things that he had heard. And he also had talked to his lawyers a lot. And, you know, I don't know at that point if he had been prepared at all for seeing somebody like me, but I could tell that this was a guy who's thinking processes were not normal. He didn't have emotional integration where he could formulate, say, a conscience, in my opinion. And to me, it was very different than what we know is in the DSM as antisocial personality, it was something else was going on.
Chris Moser [00:28:24] I'd like to hear you, Jim, explain what you saw and how it is not antisocial, but it's not the answer that would satisfy a state attorney in giving someone a life sentence.
Jim Clark [00:28:37] That's the perfect way to put it, because when I went to speak with Mr. Gaul, the theory of the case was that he was paranoid schizophrenic. And at the time I was working on my dissertation at the University of Chicago, I was involved in a National Institute of Mental Health fellowship at Chicago, and my mentor at the time was a wonderful professor named Sharon Berlin, and I was also being mentored by Professor Bill Borden, and both of them were experts on severe mental illness. I was deep, deep into that literature and also meeting many, many people with severe mental illness with schizophrenia and bipolar disorders psychotic disorders. When I met Mr. Gaul, I quickly realized that he was not paranoid, schizophrenic or did not suffer from that disorder, did not suffer from bipolar disorder, but probably had a severe brain damage. And the way I saw that was his affect was he was very disconnected emotions and other cognitive processes were disconnected. So when he talked about his crime, he talked about his life. It was like he was talking about somebody very distant from him that he had not integrated really what had happened to him in adulthood at least, and his criminal activities in a way that would organize any kind of moral response, which would be a blend of intellectual and emotional response. The other piece was this hour fact was pretty blank, not blank. That is a bad way to say, I guess, not expressive as he was talking.
Alison DeBelder [00:30:12] So this wasn't somebody who presented like a psychopath usually does with this glibness and charm.
Jim Clark [00:30:19] That's correct. A psychopath would present with extraordinarily charm. Trying to win me over probably tell me what a great, you know, a great interviewer I was, et cetera, et cetera. And I'd been with people like that in and outside of prison, sometimes in university settings.
Chris Moser [00:30:33] I almost said that,
Jim Clark [00:30:35] yeah, well, I
Alison DeBelder [00:30:36] haven't really gotten in trouble for suggesting that there are plenty of psychopaths on the bench that didn't go over well with a judge one time.
Jim Clark [00:30:45] I can imagine that would be frowned upon. But we now know that's the case. In fact, there was a very famous book written called Snakes and Suits that talk about psychopathy and sociopathy being widely distribute across socioeconomic and class lines and race and institutions. In any case, Mr. Gore was very forthcoming. The only thing he seemed to connect to emotionally and talking with me were some of his childhood memories. And I soon realized that he had experienced a very, very traumatic childhood, that he had been raised in a family where he was the target of a great deal of childhood violence. And that when he would talk about that, he would become sad. But again, his cognitive processing was not normal.
Alison DeBelder [00:31:38] Were you getting to know him when you were a part of the team was the time that you spent with him one on one? Or did you do the work getting to know him in the presence of his attorneys?
Jim Clark [00:31:50] So at the first meeting, I was with Ed and Ernie. I remember leaving the prison and we got in the car and ad and his way, laconic way said, Well, what do you think? And I said, well, he's not paranoid schizophrenic, and Ed just put his head in his hands and I heard Ernie exhale in the back seat because they have been building all of the appellate work that have been done up until that time was around that fact that he was paranoid schizophrenic and at trial there hadn't been an adequate defense, an adequate mitigation built around that understanding the mental health evaluations had been flawed. But one of the defense mental health experts have said talked about schizophrenia and psychotic disorders, so they were trying to build on that. You know, and I didn't realize I was letting them down. I thought I was really doing a good job and Sane is not. And then they looked at me and said, Well, this is really bad news. And so that was my first introduction to sometimes when you're doing this work as a mental health professional is that the lawyers have a certain hope that you'll come up with the correct answer. I'm obstinate and arrogant, like a good University of Chicago student at that time, doctoral student, and I said, Well, that's the bad news. The good news is, I think is profoundly brain damaged. And I said in the long run, I think that's a more important way to understand this man and understand the way he's Harry cumulative childhood and adolescent trauma with him and also the compulsion they are out of control sexual, ultimately homicidal behavior that that is actually a more powerful framework to understand his behavior much more than a person with paranoid schizophrenia or any kind of psychotic disorder, per se.
Alison DeBelder [00:33:37] What ended up happening with his case?
Jim Clark [00:33:39] Ultimately, the wonderful thing about the case was we were able to bring in a lot of other experts. So I brought in one of my former clinical supervisors from the University of Kentucky Lane, Val Camp, who had worked a lot with maltreated kids and adolescents. And it actually put a lot of other prisoners who were inedible at the time had contributed to their prosecution cases. But he met with and did an incredible video interview on Jane's life from early childhood to adulthood, which opened up the traumatic part of the equation. And then we were able to work with a man named James Eric Kangas, who was one of the top forensic psychiatrist neurologists in the country, was teaching at Yale and had written several textbooks, literally textbooks on brain damage and criminal behavior. And one of his great critiques of the system was that psychiatrists had ceased to be hands-on doctors. They were not looking at the body, they were not looking at organic sources. They were doing interviews, sometimes using screens and psychometric testing contributed by colleagues in psychology. But they were not sitting and doing the grind down work that a neurologist would do, who is a neurology informed psychiatrist. I learned so much from the late Dr. American-Jewish and read everything and watched all of his training tapes after that because he basically he and I were alone in the room while I did the evaluation and the prison hospital. And it became very clear. I mean, we walked out. We hadn't even hit the prison yard, which we would have to walk across to get in and out of the prison hospital. And he he told me, he said, this is a profoundly brain damaged individual. And he was shocked that with all the clinical evaluations that have been done during trial, that no one had offered that even hypothetically.
Chris Moser [00:35:32] Because this is in the 80s. I'm not sure if any scans were available to corroborate that brain injury, whether it's organic or blunt force trauma. Do you know if that is true and if when that came into existence, because I'm thinking a lot about older cases and the inability to test for DNA, for example, then retesting? Did that occur in this case?
Jim Clark [00:35:58] I can't remember if ultimately any scans were used, but I will tell you that even when scans were introduced in those days and the late 80s early 90s, they were not seen as being tremendously credible. I remember trial and appellate courts were just throwing them out because they seemed so speculative at the time. And I remember getting involved in other cases where there was really amazing evidence of frontal lobe destruction. Let's say I had one case in which I was evaluating a man with brain damage who essentially when he was about to be arrested, took a gun and shot himself in the head and destroyed us most of his frontal lobes. And they brought in, I believe, Jonathan Pincus, who was an amazing neurologist, forensic neurologist with those scans showing just the destruction and the trial court did not find it credible evidence. And that was a death penalty case in a different state. So there was emergent evidence what merit Kangas did, which was brilliant, what she did old fashioned neurology. He said that you can look at soft signs, you can look at how a person walks into the room, you can look at the symmetry of their face, the way they park their hair, the way they speak, how they use language, how they process simple questions and then more complex questions. How they handle feelings and emotions, how they describe themselves, how they see themselves. And you can develop a very good set of hypotheses about brain damage. And then what we did was brought in a wonderful forensic neuropsychologist, Dr. Wrangham, who was working a lot of cases at that time. And he did a really fine tuned neuropsychological evaluation showing that what Dr. Mary Kangas was talking about medically and in terms of the clinical evaluation was also supported by very complex neuropsychological testing. So now we had a package at the end of that that looked at life history, drill down neuro psychiatric evaluation and then neuropsychological testing. And my role in that process was as the mental health consultant trying to be the conductor, trying to help the attorneys identify these people, bring them in and then weave them into a theory, a legal theory of the case. I found that tremendously, intellectually exciting to do, and I was blown away as I began to get to know more about the public defense process. Just that that was a very rare luxury to have any of that available.
Alison DeBelder [00:38:36] And did his case end up being reversed?
Jim Clark [00:38:39] Yes, he was sentenced to life without parole. And so he was not going to leave prison. It was demonstrated that the medication was totally inadequate and insufficient and to the lawyers at the trial, had not done an adequate job representing him because they did not put together a carpet mitigation case. And I will say that was the other thing that was really a struggle. And troubling was I realize that an appellate work and public defense, you are often going after colleagues in private and public sector attorneys that practiced at trial and what a conflictual situation that turns out to be. Because it's an assault on everybody, and also I share it in that in some extent in that I was helping them write in a brief that was very critical of previous mental health professionals. So I began to realize now we're in this world at the appellate level of critiquing colleagues and other professionals for work that was done earlier in the process. And that was to me, both emotionally jarring, but also fascinating to say what a incredible level of accountability the law is introducing into the mental health world. That really, in combination with what was going on at the University of Chicago, was an education for me. I spent scores and scores of hours reading every reading, the trial transcript, reading all the mental health evaluations that had ever been produced, reading the earlier accounts of the earlier incarceration that Mr. Al had as well. So I had done hundreds of hours of work in order to work this case. And I would also say the other rarity I began to discover is I got really involved in forensics was how extraordinary Ed Monahan and Ernie Lewis were wars attorneys because they were so ultimately so open to whatever I was finding and recommending. Now they push back because, you know, that's what they do. That's what you guys do, and you should. But in the end, they followed the evidence they follow the science, which I soon learned was not the norm in practice and late 80s and 90s especially.
Alison DeBelder [00:40:56] I do have to say, though, that dynamic about trial attorneys egos being involved in these things when there are ineffective assistance claims raised. I find so bizarre and distasteful. So I've gotten calls from attorneys who I know who say they're taking a look at such and such a case and can I review my file and whatever? And unfortunately, because I've handled a lot of cases, you know, as a public defender for about a decade and I handled all kinds of cases, felony cases, people with life sentences, Jimmy race cases, I made mistakes right, had to just on the numbers. And every time I went and was hoping that this was something that had been unearthed because I would want that correct, it must have made mistakes. I'd love to have them corrected. And unfortunately, I had had the evaluation done. I had looked into whatever the thing was. But I'll tell you what people do get really upset when they're accused of screwing up, and I think it is bananas. I would love for somebody who's sitting in prison who got there on my watch to get out, and it's not about me. I just can't wrap my brain around that. But it's absolutely a thing.
Chris Moser [00:42:10] Alison Isn't it true? If the judge makes a finding of ineffective assistance of counsel on it's a private pay case, they have to return the fee. Or am I imagining that?
Alison DeBelder [00:42:21] I have no idea. You can take my bar license if one person gets out of prison. Al, go work at Starbucks. It's so weird, but I mean, I guess this wraps back around to our psychopathy conversation. Your discussion of your involvement in this case, I think, is particularly illustrative of some deficits that I think do still exist in new attorney and new criminal defense attorneys, new assistant public defenders, specifically a paucity of understanding mental illness, including severe mental illness. And then also the interviewing skills you mentioned. And I'll take them one at a time. I was incredibly lucky because I grew up in a home with doctors and doctors who are very conversant in mental illness, and I spent time in offices with people living with severe mental illness. So I had a basic understanding of these things. So when I bumped into folks, which you will do as a young lawyer, I knew what I was looking at right away or at least knew some signposts. So when I attached an expert, I could tell them, these are the indicia that I've observed, right? And it didn't occur to me. I don't think for a very long time that there are a lot of very well-intentioned, hardworking, clever people that find themselves as new criminal defense attorneys that just simply do not have that fund of knowledge. Just by happenstance. And I think that we are doing people a real disservice by not making people going into this line of work. Have some general course or certification about means severe mental illness and brain damage just in the broadest strokes. Would that make sense to you?
Jim Clark [00:44:16] Yes, I think, you know, the rigors of law school are such that, and my brother is a practicing attorney in Raleigh, so I lived through that time with him when he was going to law school many years ago at Chapel Hill. But it's such a rigorous experience. And then at the end of it, your reward is even more painful experience of passing, trying to pass the bar examination. So after you go through that type of rigor, then somebody like me shows up and says, Well, there's this whole other domain of knowledge that you have no background in, but you need to really get up to speed, at least with basics of in order to be effective as a public defender. And of course, that is really shocking. Because how much can one professional know and take, but my approach to it always has been that by introducing courses a course or two in law school, for example, or doing intensive workshopping and training inside of public defender offices for new attorneys with somebody who's sympathetic to the plight of the public defender, which we can get into someday, but sometime. But that's crucial. And I, you know, as I came to this field, I realized I knew practically nothing about the law. You know, and Ed and Ernie and other lawyers like Stephen Bright, who was a contributor to the book Who is a hero, an American hero, in my opinion. I learned so much from people like that because they shepherded me patiently through all of the fundamental constitutional problems and the procedural complexities of the law. So I knew as much about procedure as they know about mental health and mental illness. But here's the difference in Alison you're touching on that. His attitude and openness to growth, intellectual growth, professional growth and the realization of professional life is crazy because it says, while we're going to take people and we're going to throw them into a particular colleges of social work, our College of Law Medicine psychology programs either come out and they won't be able to operate at a very high level. And of course, we all land in our professional platforms and realize I only know about one percent of what I need to know. And I'm also being emotionally overwhelmed by the initiatives that assignments I mean, thrown in in the settings and the difference between, I think the great lawyers I've met and the ones that were mediocre were the great lawyers were so open to whatever they could vacuum clean up. And I found that also with judges, once I started doing more work with judges that they were better audiences than mental health professionals, I was trying to teach because they were so committed to inquiry, to understanding. And when that attitude is there and you referred to kind of the narcissism of our professional life and we're trained to be narcissists, I think to defend our profession is to defend our ideologies inside those professions. That openness can be rare, but it's one that the people that I've worked with over the years successfully really have had as attorneys and I've tremendously admired and learned from attorneys who do that.
Alison DeBelder [00:47:29] We'll be back next week with part two, trauma and justice is created by Chris Moser and Alison DeBelder and engineered by Chris Higgins. Thanks for listening. To help us out, please subscribe to the podcast, leave a star rating and review for us on Apple Podcasts and share with others who might be interested. Follow us and share your feedback on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at Trauma Injustice.