Michael Mcgrath

Sexual asphyxia can be practiced both as an autoerotic activity and as a consensual sadomasochistic act between two or more people. When consensual sexual asphyxia results in death, the death is unintended. Conversely, acts of nonconsensual sexual asphyxia would be for the needs of the person restricting the other person's oxygen source and are bes...

The polygraph is an unreliable way to determine if a particular individual is lying or truthful. The presumed scientific basis for it lacks a verifiable theory and the test lacks validity. It cannot tell us if tracings on paper are proof of a lie or the truth. The vast majority of the literature from the field is useless. Literature that employs an...

Professionalization is the process by which any trade or vocation becomes professional, characterized by a high degree of competence with respect to domain-specific knowledge, skills, and abilities. Ideally, professional societies, associations, and organizations are intended to assist with the professionalization of the fields they serve. This gen...

Allegations of sexual assault are just that. Consequently, until there has been an investigation and a criminal conviction, the person making the allegation may only be referred to as a complainant. Referring to them as a “victim” prior to this is biased, from a forensic perspective, and violates the function of a criminal trial. This is because us...

Victim response to violent crime is variable from person to person, making it very difficult if not impossible to predict how a crime victim should or will behave. A victim's response usually involves three stages of recovery: (1) dealing with the initial impact of the attack; (2) attempting to reconstitute his or her former self; and (3) reorganiz...

Apart from fingerprints or DNA, perhaps the most powerful evidence that an investigator can have is a suspect confession or eyewitness identification. Either can be enough to get an indictment and then eventually lead a jury to convict. However, through DNA exonerations, both types of evidence have been revealed as more fallible than generally pres...

Highlighted by the endless waves of convictions overturned because of compelling DNA evidence, the problem of false confessions has become recognized in the criminal justice community as a legitimate issue. There is no accurate data on the prevalence of false confessions. However, what was once thought to be an anomaly related to mental illness or...

Correctional settings are visited by mental health practitioners under a variety of different employment circumstances, providing inmate evaluations and treatment. This chapter provides an overview of the ethical issues encountered by mental health practitioners employed directly by a correctional facility. These include ethical issues related to i...

In this chapter, a forensic psychiatrist provides an overview of case linkage where attempts are made to link multiple crimes back to an offender(s) through a behavioral examination of the act. McGrath will cover not only the theory and underlying assumptions behind case linkage, but will also look in depth at the case of New Jersey v. Fortin, whic...

People lie at some point in life, either to protect themselves or to protect others. In some instances, these untruths may be referred to as “white lies”—when they are harmless, perhaps beneficial to those around, and contribute to the greater good. Under other circumstances, a lie may be an utter betrayal of personal or professional commitments, i...

Sexual asphyxia can be practiced both as an autoerotic activity and as a consensual sadomasochistic act between two or more people. When consensual sexual asphyxia results in death, the death is unintended. Conversely, acts of nonconsensual sexual asphyxia would be for the needs of the person restricting the other person's oxygen source and are bes...

This chapter presents the nature and scope of false allegations made regarding sexual assault. False reporting is generally a crime, even when reports are made indirectly to authorities by a third party, such as a friend, intimate partner, spouse, employer, counselor, or medical professional. It is suggested that false allegations of a sexual assau...

This chapter gives an overview of trauma as a concept of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and rape trauma syndrome (RTS), and the investigation of sexual assault. The sex crimes investigator should be aware that the reasoning employed is usually circular and not dispositive of guilt. An expert can offer an opinion that an individual shows certa...

This chapter reviews eyewitness identification evidence and procedures, highlighting recommendations for decreasing the risk of a false identification. It is suggested that while relied upon to a great degree by law enforcement and the courts, it is important that weaknesses inherent in eyewitness testimony be understood and attended to. It is very...

Pathological altruism is a construct describing the willingness of an individual to place the needs of others above him- or herself to the point of causing harm, whether physical, psychological, or both, to the purported altruist. Codependency can be viewed as a form of pathological altruism. The study of codependency has been hampered by limited a...

Many harmful deeds - from “co-dependency” to suicide martyrdom to genocide - are committed with the altruistic intention to help companions or one’s own in-group. Thus, it is worthwhile to study how well-meaning altruism can shade into pathology. In essence, pathological altruism might be thought of as any behavior or personal tendency where either...

This chapter discusses the relationship between criminal profilers and the media during the Beltway Sniper shootings in October 2002. The first five killings in the shooting spree took place within a 2-mile radius inside of Montgomery County, Maryland, over a period of only 16 hours. In a misguided attempt to assuage increasingly concerned parents,...

A false allegation, or a false report, is a false statement, accusation, or complaint to authorities alleging a crime that did not occur. In most jurisdictions, this is itself a crime. In such cases, the alleged victim is actually a criminal offender subject to legal consequences. This chapter discusses some of the many motivations for false report...

Extract: Everyone has told a lie at some point in their life, whether it be to protect themselves or to protect others. We often tell the so called "white lie" so as not to hurt the feelings of others, and we might lie to ourselves about some aspect of our life such as weight gain or personal happiness. But lying is not in itself a crime when done...

Extract: Criminal profilers are regularly enlisted as the pundit of choice by media agencies reporting on developments related to unsolved crimes in the public eye. In fact, a review of the Criminal Profiling Archives (located at http://www.corpus-delicti.com/prof_archives_media.html) shows that rarely has a sensational crime occurred in the past 5...

Forensic psychology and forensic psychiatry refer to the application of the behavioral sciences to legal questions. Common psycholegal questions that forensic mental health professionals answer involve (1) risk for future sexual offense recidivism, (2) competency to stand trial, and (3) criminal responsibility/sanity at the time of the offense. In...

The growth of the Internet has revolutionized how society conducts business in many areas. Not to be left behind, the sexual predator and the obsessional harasser have found cyberspace to be a vehicle capable of meeting their needs: obtaining information, monitoring and contacting victims, developing fantasy, overcoming inhibitions, avoiding appreh...

Criminal profiling is a field that has gained notoriety in the mainstream consciousness, yet few people realize what it is that criminal profilers actually do and who is doing it. Suffering from a limited applied scientific literature that seems overshadowed by memoir trade books and journalistic style research, the field lacks a consensus regardin...