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  • Psychiatry is Regimeist Criminality Posing As Therapy

    Psychiatry is Regimeist Criminality Posing As Therapy

    http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...?p=656#post656


    What Is Antipsychiatry?
    by Thomas S. Szasz


    http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/szasz2.1.1.html


    Merriam-Webster defines psychiatry as "a branch of medicine that deals with mental, emotional, or behavioral disorders"; Wikipedia, as "a medical specialty which exists to study, prevent, and treat mental disorders in humans." These descriptions do not tell us what the psychiatrist does and is expected, legally and professionally, to do. That non-disclosure disguises the ugly truth: psychiatry is coercion masquerading as care. It is testimony to the effectiveness of that feeble disguise – and of our aversion to recognizing embarrassing truths about ourselves and our honored institutions – that most libertarian writers have given, and continue to give, psychiatry a free ride.

    Medical specialists are distinguished by the diagnostic and therapeutic methods that characterize their work: the pathologist examines cells, tissues, and body fluids; the surgeon cuts into the living body, removes diseased tissues, and repairs malfunctioning body parts; the anesthesiologist renders the patient unconscious and insensitive to pain; and the psychiatrist coerces and excuses: he identifies innocent persons as "mentally ill and dangerous to themselves and others" and deprives them of liberty, and he excuses people of their responsibilities for their actions and obligations by testifying in court under oath that persons guilty of lawbreaking are not responsible for their criminal acts. The former practice is called "civil commitment," the latter, "the insanity defense." These legal-psychiatric interventions constitute the pillars upon which the edifice called "psychiatry" rests.

    To be sure, psychiatrists also listen and talk to persons who seek their help. However, this does not distinguish them from others; nearly everyone does that. The difficulty peculiar to psychiatry – obvious yet often overlooked – is that the term refers to two radically different kinds of practices: curing-healing "souls" by conversation, and coercing-controlling persons by force, authorized and mandated by the state. Critics of psychiatry, journalists, and the public alike regularly fail to distinguish between the linguistic practice of counseling voluntary clients and the forensic practice of coercing-and-excusing captives of the psychiatric system.

    The bread and butter of the modern psychiatrist is: 1) writing prescriptions for psychoactive drugs and pretending that they are therapeutically effective against mental illnesses; 2) prescribing these drugs to persons willing to take them and forcibly compelling persons deemed "seriously mentally ill" to take them against their will; and 3) converting voluntary mental patients who appear to be "dangerous to themselves or others" to involuntary mental patients. Indeed, the modern psychiatrist no longer has the option to reject the use of force vis-?-vis patients: such conduct is considered dereliction of professional responsibility.

    In 1967, my efforts to undermine the moral legitimacy of the alliance of psychiatry and the state suffered a serious blow: the creation of the antipsychiatry movement. Voltaire’s famous aphorism, "God protect me from my friends, I’ll take care of my enemies," proved to apply perfectly to what happened next: although my critique of the alliance of psychiatry and the state antedates by two decades the reinvention and popularization of the term "antipsychiatry," I was smeared as an antipsychiatrist and my critics wasted no time identifying and dismissing me as a "leading antipsychiatrist."

    The psychiatric establishment’s rejection of my critique of the concept of mental illness and its defense of coercion as cure and of excuse-making as humanism posed no danger to my work. On the contrary. Contemporary "biological" psychiatrists tacitly recognized that mental illnesses are not, and cannot be, brain diseases: once a putative disease becomes a proven disease it ceases to be classified as a mental disorder and is reclassified as a bodily disease; or, in the persistent absence of such evidence, a mental disorder becomes a nondisease. That is how one type of madness, neurosyphilis, became a brain disease, while another type, masturbatory insanity, became reclassified as a nondisease.

    Not surprisingly, the more aggressively I reminded psychiatrists that individuals incarcerated in mental hospitals are deprived of liberty, the more zealously psychiatrists insisted that "mental illnesses are like other illnesses" and that psychiatric institutions are bona fide medical hospitals. The psychiatric establishment’s defense of coercions and excuses thus reinforced my argument about the metaphorical nature of mental illness and importance of the distinction between coerced and consensual psychiatry.

    I have long maintained that mental illnesses are counterfeit diseases (nondiseases), that coerced psychiatric relations are like coerced labor relations (slavery), and spent the better part of my professional life criticizing the concept of mental illness, objecting to the practices of involuntary-institutional psychiatry, and advocating the abolition of psychiatric slavery.

    In the late 1960s, a group of psychiatrists, led by David Cooper (1931–1986) and Ronald D. Laing (1927–1989), began to criticize conventional psychiatry, especially so-called somatic treatments. But instead of advocating the abolition of Institutional Psychiatry, they sought to replace it with their own brand, which they called "Anti-Psychiatry." By means of this dramatic misnomer, they attracted attention to themselves and deflected attention from what they did, which continued to include coercions and excuses based on psychiatric authority and power. Thus, antipsychiatry is a type of psychiatry. The psychiatrist qua health-care professional is a fraud, and so too is the antipsychiatrist. In Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, I showed that psychiatry – an imitation of medicine – is a form of quackery. In this volume, I show that antipsychiatry – a form of alternative psychiatry – is quackery squared.

    My writings form no part of either psychiatry or antipsychiatry and belong to neither. They belong to conceptual analysis, social-political criticism, the defense of liberty, and common sense. This is why I rejected, and continue to reject, psychiatry and antipsychiatry with equal vigor.

    This essay is an edited extract from Antipsychiatry: Quackery Squared, by Thomas Szasz, to be published by Syracuse University Press, September 2009.

    July 14, 2009

    http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/szasz2.1.1.html

    Thomas Szasz is professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York. Visit his website.

    Pastor Lindstedt's Web Page
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  • #2
    YOU Can Be Sent to a State Mental Hospital for Refusing the Services of a Public Defender!!!

    YOU Can Be Sent to a State Mental Hospital for Refusing the Services of a Public Defender!!!
    Written by Dr. Hal Williams
    Friday, 10 August 2007




    http://www.vnnforum.com/showthread.p...295#post599295
    http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...=5227#post5227


    Martin is a litigative and political gadfly. Unlike Socrates he refuses to “drink the hemlock”. What would you do?


    Martin has been at the Missouri state mental hospital at Fulton (FSH) almost two years and locked up for longer than that.

    There are no facts in support of a hotline allegation made against him. There are only vague references to criminal activity alleged to have taken place at some time within a several month period, YEARS AGO.


    You, too, can now be sent to FSH for refusing the services of a public defender! If accused of a crime you did not commit, and you want to defend yourself... you must be nuts! Nevermind the fact that the Public Defender’s services are overburdened, if not incompetent, plea bargains to a lesser charge being their stock in trade.

    So, the judges in Newton County will send you to FSH for a 96 hour “evaluation” and order you to be kept there even after being “certified competent” and discharged! You will not need to be formally arraigned on the original charges. You can be kept at FSH indefinitely in a “pre-trial” limbo status for months and months... YEARS! Your contact with family and friends will be severely curtailed. Your phone conversations and mail will be monitored.

    While at FSH all mental disorders and illness will be ruled out, but in order to keep you there and keep you quiet you will be diagnosed with a “psychosis not otherwise specified” (NOS) and FORCED to take mind-altering drugs that you have no need for and do not want to take. You will be kept from doing any legal research in defense of the original charge or for stopping the continued abuse of the system within the confines of the mental hospital. You will not be allowed to develop a legal file. You can not receive newspapers, magazines, or hard cover books. You will be surrounded with violent, psychotic “clients” and felons and given a bad report if any of them attack you!

    So much for a “fair and speed trial” in Missouri. So much for your “rights”. So much for “innocent until proven guilty”.

    Martin needs your help. You need your help. Remember you can be accused and locked up, just like Martin. Martin needs a good private attorney and does not have all the funds necessary to initiate his defense.

    If you care to help put a stop to this injustice and protect your own future please contact Dr. Williams at saleboat2@yahoo.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or write to
    Martin c/o 208 W. Sexton Rd. Columbia, MO 65203

    http://theprysms.com/content/view/209/66/



    Pastor Lindstedt's Web Page
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    Comment


    • #3
      Don't be misled

      Don't be misled

      by NutHouse Regime Criminal/MarcusP


      http://www.vnnforum.com/showthread.p...471#post599471
      http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...=5229#post5229



      I work in a state mental hospital, though in a different state, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that they are not used by the state as tools of political repression. I, for one, would not keep quiet about it if they were. Neither would the other doctors or nurses I know.

      There are some patients there who successfully played the system and were found NGRI (not guilty by reason of insanity). The hospital's a softer place to do time than prison. Then we get a few who act crazy while in custody and are there for "competency evaluation" or "competency restoration." These patients are strictly short-term stays for that purpose. With those exceptions, I've never seen ANY court-ordered patient who wasn't seriously crazy and dangerous to themselves or others.

      The administrators in these places are fanatical about "patient rights." Fuck the staff, they have no rights. The lowest scum of the earth are treated like solid gold. If this guy's been put away for 2 years, I guaran damn tee you there's a good reason.


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      • #4
        Interesting.
        Last edited by Pissturd Wei?mamzer; 03-27-2010, 10:11 AM.
        You would be better off if you had nothing to do with me in the first place.

        http://www.whitenationalist.org/foru...ted=1#post1917

        Comment


        • #5
          New mental health manual is "dangerous" say experts

          New mental health manual is "dangerous" say experts


          http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8181WX20120209
          http://stumbleinn.net/forum/showthre...424#post337424
          http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...=5264#post5264


          (Reuters) - Millions of healthy people - including shy or defiant children, grieving relatives and people with fetishes - may be wrongly labeled mentally ill by a new international diagnostic manual, specialists said on Thursday.

          In a damning analysis of an upcoming revision of the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychologists, psychiatrists and other experts said new categories of mental illness identified in the book were at best "silly" and at worst "worrying and dangerous."

          "Many people who are shy, bereaved, eccentric, or have unconventional romantic lives will suddenly find themselves labeled as mentally ill," said Peter Kinderman, head of Liverpool University's Institute of Psychology at a briefing in London about widespread concerns over the manual.

          "It's not humane, it's not scientific, and it won't help decide what help a person needs."

          The DSM is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and has symptoms and other criteria for diagnosing mental disorders. It is used internationally and seen as the diagnostic "bible" for mental health medicine.

          No one from the APA was immediately available for comment.

          More than 11,000 health professionals have already signed a petition (at dsm5-reform.com) calling for the development of the fifth edition of the manual to be halted and re-thought.

          Some diagnoses - for conditions like "oppositional defiant disorder" and "apathy syndrome" - risk devaluing the seriousness of mental illness and medical zing behaviors most people would consider normal or just mildly eccentric, the experts said.

          At the other end of the spectrum, the new DSM, due out next year, could give medical diagnoses for serial rapists and sex abusers - under labels like "paraphilic coercive disorder" - and may allow offenders to escape prison by providing what could be seen as an excuse for their behavior, they added.

          RADICAL, RECKLESS, AND INHUMANE

          Simon Wessely of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London said a look back at history should make health experts ask themselves: "Do we need all these labels?"

          He said the 1840 Census of the United States included just one category for mental disorder, but by 1917 the APA was already recognizing 59. That rose to 128 in 1959, to 227 in 1980, and again to around 350 disorders in the fastest revisions of DSM in 1994 and 2000.

          Allen Frances of Duke University and chair of the committee that oversaw the previous DSM revision, said DSM-5 would "radically and recklessly expand the boundaries of psychiatry" and result in the "lexicalization of normality, individual difference, and criminality."

          David Pilgrim of Britain's University of Central Lancashire said it was "hard to avoid the conclusion that DSM-5 will help the interests of the drug companies."

          "Madness and misery exist but they come in many shapes and sizes," he said. "We risk treating the experience and conduct of people as if they are botanical specimens waiting to be identified and categorized in rigid boxes.

          "That would itself be a form of collective madness for all those complicit in the continuing pseudo-scientific exercise."

          Nick Craddock of Cardiff University's department of psychological medicine and neurology, who also spoke at the London briefing, cited depression as a key example of where DSM's broad categories were going wrong.

          Whereas in previous editions, a person who had recently lost a loved one and was suffering low moods would be seen as experiencing a normal human reaction to bereavement, the new DSM criteria would ignore the death, look only at the symptoms, and class the person as having a depressive illness.

          Other examples of diagnoses cited by experts as problematic included "gambling disorder," "internet addiction disorder" and "oppositional defiant disorder" - a condition in which a child "actively refuses to comply with majority's requests" and "performs deliberate actions to annoy others."

          "That basically means children who say 'no' to their parents more than a certain number of times," Kinderman said. "On that criteria, many of us would have to say our children are mentally ill."


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          • #6
            What is the most gratuitously bad drug class - my vote goes to the 'atypical antipsychotics'

            What is the most gratuitously bad drug class - my vote goes to the 'atypical antipsychotics'


            http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com...-bad-drug.html
            http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...=7673#post7673


            And within this class, to the egregious, multi-billion-dollar poison by the name of Olanzapine/ Zyprexa: my personal choice for the most worse-than-useless, evil-nasty-dishonest drug blockbuster of all time.

            Any other candidates?

            *

            What follows is a shortened and edited version of:

            http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.co...cs-are-un.html

            *

            The perversity of currently operative incentives in the drug development, research, marketing and clinical use can be illustrated by considering the example of the so-called ‘atypical’ neuroleptics, which have grown to become a standard part of modern psychiatric practice.

            Atypicals represent a backward step in therapeutics, probably being no more effective, much more dangerous, and greatly more expensive than already-existing agents.

            *

            The traditional antipsychotics (aka. neuroleptics or major tranquillizers) are very powerful agents for controlling agitated and psychotic behaviour when compared with the drugs in use before their discovery. The pre-antipsychotic behavioural control agents had been mainly sedatives (e.g. antihistamines, barbiturates, bromides and paraldehyde).

            However, the antipsychotics, such as chlorpromazine, haloperidol and fluphenazine decanoate – are now seen to be neurotoxic. They achieve their distinctively powerful behavioural control by making patients Parkinsonian in a dose–dependent fashion, with permanent neurological disease (tardive dyskinesia) as the long-term consequence of prolonged high dosages.

            Furthermore, it is now apparent that antipsychotics induce dependence, so that withdrawal tends to provoke psychotic episodes, and patients who have never taken antipsychotics have a better prognosis than those who are maintained on them. Short-term benefits are achieved at the cost of long-term harm.

            On top of this, antipsychotics are notoriously unpleasant. Indeed, patients hate them, since the emotional effects of Parkinson’s disease include emotional blunting, mental dullness and demotivation; and sometimes agitated feelings of akathisia (inner turmoil and physical restlessness). These are not ‘side effects’ of antipsychotics, on the contrary they are the core therapeutic action.

            In a nutshell, antipsychotics work by causing the psychological symptoms of Parkinsonism.

            *

            So, traditional antipsychotics are exceptionally nasty drugs whose use should be minimized as a matter of policy, and for which safer and less unpleasant replacements should be sought. So much is probably uncontroversial, at least at a personal level among informed psychiatric scientists, although for structural, professional reasons this conviction is seldom clearly stated as such.

            The main response to this state of affairs has been the displacement of traditional antipsychotics by a group of drugs self-styled as ‘atypical’ antipsychotics, such as clozapine, risperidone, quetiapine and olanzapine. Clozapine is not a 'neuroleptic', by classical definitions and the others of this class are much weaker neuroleptics than traditional drugs.

            Because atypicals have less tendency to cause Parkinsonian symptoms and tardive dyskinesia than traditional agents, they are consequently less powerful at suppressing behaviour than traditional antipsychotics; but atypicals are powerful enough (it turns out) for most purposes.

            It seems that in their clinical effect, atypicals are essentially the pre-chlorpromazine sedative antihistamines, re-invented and re-packaged for modern times.

            Indeed, an old antihistamine such as cyproheptadine might well be counted as functionally an ‘atypical’ antipsychotic by today’s criteria i.e. it blocks serotonin 2 and cholinergic receptors, it is (probably, like many old antihistamines) only weakly anti-dopaminergic, it is powerfully sedative and it causes weight gain. Yet cyproheptadine, is an off-patent drug, and available cheaply over-the-counter.

            *

            But if most of the atypicals are only weakly neurotoxic they are instead ‘metabolic poisons’; having poorly-understood (this poor understanding itself being a damning indictment of the structural biases of contemporary psychiatric research) but clearly damaging effects on various aspects of energy metabolism.

            Atypicals tend to cause physiological damage, such as glucose intolerance, diabetes and perhaps pancreatitis; gross weight gain and cardiac conduction problems.

            Atypicals are also associated with significantly increased mortality, from a variety of causes.(Clozapine, notoriously, causes lethal blood dyscrasias, requiring continuous monitoring.)

            These lethal side effects occur in the context of long-term prescription for psychiatric disorders which are often self-limiting and rarely fatal.

            *

            Perhaps the main useful lesson from the emergence of the ‘atypical’ (i.e. weak) antipsychotics is that psychiatrists did not actually need to make all of their agitated and psychotic patients Parkinsonian in order to suppress their behaviour.

            Atypicals are highly sedative agents. Apparently, the kind of sedation provided by the ‘atypicals’ is sufficient for behavioural control in most instances.

            This should not have been a surprise, since sedation was the standard method of controlling agitation and acute psychoses before the emergence of antipsychotics and in situations where antipsychotics were not available (e.g. in the Eastern Bloc and underdeveloped countries).

            *

            Indeed, the value of sedation should not be underestimated. Sedation is not merely a relatively safe way of controlling agitated behaviour; sedation also provides a potentially ‘curative’ benefit for psychotic patients with a causative element of delirium. Sleep has profoundly restorative qualities where sleep disturbance is severe and prolonged, as is the case for many psychotic patients. In sum, drugs which promote sleep likely have an ‘anti-psychotic’ effect, as well as making patients both feel and function better.

            *

            In terms of therapeutic value, it therefore seems likely that ‘atypicals’ are merely an unusually dangerous way of sedating patients. In therapeutic terms these drugs therefore represent a significant backward step.

            Rationally, the atypicals should now be dropped and replaced with safer sedatives. Potential antipsychotic-substitutes which already exist would include benzodiazepines and sedative antihistamines, such as promethazine plus of course that original but unacknowledged atypical: cyproheptaidine.

            *

            So - if psychiatrists want a drug to make patients sleepy, then why not use cyproheptadine?

            True, cyproheptadine may lack the advantages of vast expense, plus numerous and potentially lethal side effects of the modern 'atypicals' - but at least it shares the same basic mechanism, including the side effect of causing significant weight gain.

            Since psychiatrists apparently want their patients to be both sleepy and fat - this would seem like the perfect answer.

            Unless they really insist on using pricey poisons...


            Last edited by Librarian; 01-28-2013, 11:32 PM.
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            • #7
              How 'civil commitment' enables indefinite detention of sex offenders

              How 'civil commitment' enables indefinite detention of sex offenders

              Many sex offenders are held indefinitely past their sentence on a recidivism assessment that's almost impossible to challenge

              James Ridgeway


              https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-sex-offenders
              http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...=9205#post9205

              Most people would think that once you have served a jail sentence, you are free to go. But that's not always the case.

              When it comes to sex offenders, a number of states and the federal government have laws that allow them to keep you in jail, simply because they consider you a potential recidivist. Through a legal procedure called "civil commitment", you can be classed as a sexually violent predator based solely on the subjective opinion of a state-employed psychologist or sex expert.

              Once placed under a civil commitment, you are essentially in prison indefinitely. This can quickly become a nightmare, particularly in instances such as an "agreed disposition'' – similar to a plea bargain in a criminal trial – where a person may have been pushed to waive his right to appeal (pdf) during negotiations.

              No one knows for sure how many sex offenders there are in the US, but well over 747,000 people are listed on registries. Some are, indeed, pedophiles, but one third of offenders have committed their crime as children. The recidivism rate for sex offenders in general is low, with government statistics showing the rate at around 5%, versus 60% for all criminal activity.

              The topic, especially with the Ariel Castro horror in Cleveland fresh in everybody's minds, is charged with emotion. There is little regard for sex offenders in the justice system: defense lawyers are loath to take a case before a jury, fearing instant conviction, and judges often can barely hide their disgust should they render a decision at a bench trial.

              So, the Virginia case of a young gay college student named Galen Baughman is all the more remarkable. Baughman gambled with his future when he decided to take his case before a Virginia jury. Yet, amazingly, he won.

              Baughman had been a college student in the early 2000s at the University of Indiana, studying to become an opera singer. He was sentenced in a Virginia court in 2004 to 30 years in prison for "aggravated sexual battery" and sex with a minor (aged 13-15), after having been charged initially with soliciting sex over the internet and disseminating indecent materials to minors. Baughman claimed the sexual encounters were not forced.

              The judge suspended part of the sentence; even so, Baughman spent nine years in prison – half of that time in one sort of segregation or another, despite serving his sentence without any infraction.

              In 2007, just as he was looking forward to release, Virginia officials unexpectedly informed Baughman that they believed he might qualify for civil commitment. In June 2009, Virginia authorities decided this was indeed the case. Without filing any additional charges, they held him in prison for a further 25 months in order to assess his behavior.

              One day, a psychologist arrived at the prison, and said he wanted to interview Baughman to determine whether he was a sexually violent predator. Baughman said he would be glad to answer questions but wanted an attorney present. At that, the psychologist left, never to return.

              Baughman's two attorneys, Charles Burnham and Eugene Gorokhov of Washington, DC, asked the state to conduct an evaluation with Baughman and one of his attorneys present. Virginia refused, and as Baughman's subsequent habeas petition claimed, "took the position that the request for counsel constituted a refusal to participate, and indicated that it was contrary to office policy to conduct an evaluation if the respondent first sought advice of counsel". The state court agreed.

              Then, on 9 October 2009, Virginia initiated formal proceedings against Baughman. All along, Baughman had sought to introduce testimony from his own expert witness: a Johns Hopkins medical doctor and an acknowledged expert in sex offense matters, who has consulted with the FBI, testified before the US Senate, been a member of the White House conference on sexual disorders, and worked with the Boston archdiocese on pedophilia cases.

              Under civil commitment, the state can hold a person for an undetermined length of time until its therapy works to the satisfaction of law enforcement agents. His doctor's report, made available to me by Baughman and his attorneys, concluded with an assessment that despite past actions:


              [Baughman] has no condition which makes him likely to engage in 'sexually violent' acts. Therefore, in my professional opinion, he does not meet the statutory requirements for civil commitment as a 'sexually violent predator'.
              .

              At the subsequent trial, the judge refused to allow the expert's evaluation to be entered in Baughman's defense, instead relying wholly on the state's own expert's report. This was based on written evaluations made years ago.

              In the end, a jury of six women and one man found Baughman not likely to be a sexually violent predator. After listening to the state's prosecutor describe what Baughman might do if let out of jail, one perplexed juror was reported to have asked: "But what's the crime?"

              Baughman is thus believed to be the first person in Virginia ever to win such a civil commitment jury trial, and one of the few nationally. He was released on probation, and subject to the state's policy that relies on polygraphs, therapy sessions, and a process called the "containment model".

              The therapy is unusual in that Baughman believes the therapist functioned as a sort of surrogate cop. As he put it:

              .

              It is absolutely the case that everything I say to my therapist ends up on my probation officer's desk – which means it also ends up on the prosecutor's desk.
              .

              Baughman sought to re-enter the University of Indiana, but was blocked by the state of Virginia. The school eventually reversed the decision, but Baughman then found himself blocked by the state of Indiana.

              So, he is stuck in Virginia. He does not drive a car because he fears any cop who runs his plate will notice he is on the sex offender registry and look for a reason to pull him over, if only to harass him. Even a simple traffic ticket leads him to worry whether the encounter could turn into a violation that would land him back in prison.

              Baughman's parole officer, at least, has been generally supportive of his charge, even moving away from containment model therapy. Still, many would find the terms of Baughman's probation over the top. He has been asked by Virginia sex inspectors, who are employed to enforce sex offender treatment, how many times a day he masturbates and what he thinks about when he masturbates, along with the details of actual sexual activities. Baughman says, "As part of that program, I was required to disclose this information to them." The state probation officers declined to discuss Baughman's case with me.

              Baughman faces six more years on probation. He had studied to be an opera singer, but like so many sex offenders, he has little chance of obtaining meaningful employment. He has come to see no future for himself in the US. Instead, he might go to Europe, maybe France, to obtain actual freedom and intimate liberty.

              His probation conditions may be restrictive and intrusive, but Baughman is lucky to have two aggressive attorneys fighting in his corner. Most accused sex offenders are simply told to plea-bargain their way into civil commitment. Once under civil commitment, they may spend the rest of their lives in prison.

              While there are, undoubtedly, some irremediable sex offenders who need to be confined for reasons of public safety, the civil commitment protocol denies some of the basic rights afforded other criminal defendants. These include the right to a speedy trial, full right to counsel and, perhaps most importantly, the right to introduce testimony from a defendant's own experts. Without the protection of this last right, some defendants are sent off to prison for an indefinite sentence on the basis of questionable opinions from the state's expert witnesses.

              Civil commitment for sex offenders needs to be reformed root-and-branch or abandoned. The policy may be popular in law enforcement circles, fewer than half of US states have such laws. But in those states that have it, Baughman is the rare exception; most do not escape this largely invisible American gulag.

              .


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              • #8
                Jury finds Joplin man to be a sexually violent predator

                Jury finds Joplin man to be a sexually violent predator

                Jeff Lehr, Tuesday. Feb 26, 2019


                https://www.joplinglobe.com/news/loc...43c4915d6.html
                http://christian-identity.net/forum/...9380#post19380
                http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...9381#post19381


                A Jasper County jury deliberated about 36 minutes Tuesday before deciding Daniel Lee Menteer is a sexually violent predator who should remain locked up indefinitely.

                A jury of seven women and four men returned the verdict at the conclusion of a two-day trial in Jasper County Circuit Court of a probate court action brought by the Missouri attorney general's office seeking a civil commitment of the 36-year-old former Joplin man beyond the completion of his prison sentence for molesting an 8-year-old girl in 2010.

                The jury's verdict means Menteer will be committed to secure confinement with the Missouri Department of Mental Health for "control, care and treatment" until his doctors and the court determine that he has changed sufficiently to be released.

                With credit for time served in jail awaiting trial and "good time" earned in prison, Menteer completed his eight-year sentence on Jan. 23, 2016. But he has remained locked up for about three years past the completion of his sentence pending the outcome of this week's trial under the state's sexually violent predator act.

                Under the law, the state may petition the court in the county where an inmate was convicted of a sexually violent crime to consider committing the inmate to indefinite lockup. If probable cause for such a commitment is found by the local court, then the inmate is given a trial at which jurors are charged with determining if the inmate has "a mental abnormality" that makes him or her "more likely than not to engage in predatory acts of sexual violence if not confined in a secure facility."

                In Menteer's case, the state filed to block his release in late 2015, and Circuit Judge David Mouton found that probable cause existed for the state's concern at a hearing on Jan. 19, 2016, one week before Menteer was to be released.

                A Missouri Department of Mental Health doctor testified at the trial that Menteer's mental abnormality is a pedophilic disorder, with "pedophile" defined as someone who exhibits sexual interest in, or behaviors with, prepubescent children — 13 years old or younger — when they are 5 years or more older than the child. Menteer was convicted of deviate sexual assault of a prepubescent girl in 2002 in Newton County and received a four-year sentence. The victim in the case told her mother that Menteer followed her into her bedroom and made her sit next to him with his pants pulled own while he molested her with his hand and some object she could not describe because he made her close her eyes, according to court records.

                In the 2010 case in Jasper County, he originally faced charges of first-degree statutory rape and first-degree statutory sodomy. He pleaded guilty to the lesser offense of first-degree child molestation in a plea agreement and received the eight-year prison sentence.

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