Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

How to Conjure a Ghost to Get a Murderer to Confess

ghost-prisoner

The proliferation of projection technology and electrical gadgets in the 1920s allowed people to conjure spirits. Well, spirits of a mechanical variety anyway. These ghoulish Jazz Age illusions entertained audiences and fooled ardent believers. But some thought that maybe this wave of high-tech ghosts could be put to use beyond the parlor tricks of supposed mystics. The November 1924 issue of Science and Invention magazine proposed using a slide projector and a little smoke to coax a confession out of alleged murderers—a "novel third degree method," as they put it. From the ... Read More

Is Drug Trafficking Worse Than Murder?

drug-trafficking-jail

In Ecuador, an impoverished woman plans to sell 335 grams of a drug she cannot even identify. She’s caught. Her sentence? Eight years in prison. In Mexico, a woman finds heroin planted in her suitcase. Her punishment? Twenty-two years behind bars. In Bolivia, a man stomps coca, the first step in the process to make cocaine. His penalty? Ten years. Mexico, Bolivia, and Ecuador are nations where the minimum and maximum penalties for drug traffickers are longer than those given to murderers. For years, Latin American governments have been dishing out increasingly harsh punishments to people ... Read More

A Masterful Look at Anti-Apartheid

West Memphis 3

Shortly after my mother died in 1983, I sat down with her financial adviser to go over her estate and to decide what to do with the money she had left me. I discovered mom had investments in South Africa, then a pariah state for its racist policy of apartheid. When I told the adviser that I did not want to invest in that country, her response was, “What’s wrong with South Africa?” My answer was to find another investment adviser and divest immediately — which made me one of the millions of people influenced by the international anti-apartheid movement, an effort that is exhaustively ... Read More

LAPD Cracks Cold Cases With Science, Grit

His list of victims could read like a yearbook: Debra Jackson, 1985; Henrietta Wright, 1986; Barbara Ware, Bernita Sparks, and Mary Lowe, 1987; Alicia Alexander and Lachrica Jefferson, 1988. Then, after a break of more than a dozen years — the "sleeper" period that inspired his nickname — Valerie McCorvey, 2003. Four years after that — Jenica Peters, 2007. All of the victims were black women. They were as young as 18 and as old as 36 when he ended their lives. Most were sexually assaulted and then shot, their bodies left in alleys or trash bins along a stretch of Western Avenue in ... Read More

In Crimes of Passion, Women Get Benefit of the Doubt

Can a woman who kills her cheating husband convince a jury she was justified? Newly published research suggests it’s unlikely. However, she is liable to get a shorter sentence than a man convicted under the same circumstances. That’s the conclusion of a study of love-triangle homicides by psychologists Laurie Ragatz of West Virginia University and Brenda Russell of Penn State Berks. Utilizing an Internet survey of 458 people (63 percent men), they explored the various ways ingrained attitudes and prejudices shape our views of criminal defendants. As they report in the Journal of ... Read More

FBI Hits the Road for the Missing Missing

The FBI has publicized a program it's had active for the past five years, a 'Highway Serial Killers Initiative,' with both its own release and a fascinating story by the Los Angeles Times' Scott Glover. The upshot is that there are a lot of unsolved murders out there, and many of them may be traced to people whose livelihoods revolve around long-distance driving, like truckers. As the FBI puts it in a surprisingly readable press release: "The victims in these cases are primarily women who are living high-risk, transient lifestyles, often involving substance abuse and prostitution. ... Read More

Calming the Storm That Spawns School Shooters

School shooters, the author of a new book argues, are driven by a toxic mix of adolescent angst and personality disorder. Easing the pain and spotting the warning signs offer the best hope for preventing the next tragedy. School rampage killings are not a uniquely American phenomenon (Finland has had two horrific cases in recent memory), but the complex set of psychological and sociological conditions that spawn such events are far more likely to spring from the modern suburban landscape in the U.S. Though ultimately rare, cases of school shootings are on the rise, says Yeshiva ... Read More