Two Defendants, Two Trials
As followers of The Jury Box Blog know, I have been blogging and tweeting regularly about the trials of Michael and Carolyn Riley, who were both accused of murdering their four-year-old daughter, Rebecca, by administering to her dangerously high doses of ADHD medicine, and then refusing to seek medical attention when she fell deathly ill.
Originally, the pair was scheduled to be tried together. Shortly before jury selection was scheduled to begin, defense counsel made a motion for separate trials, on the grounds that each was likely to implicate the other in mounting a defense. The district attorney did not object and the judge granted the request, recognizing the potential conflict of interest.
The district attorney was then faced with a new set of tasks. Rather than convincing one jury that the couple acted in concert, he had to convince one jury that Carolyn was responsible and then a completely different jury that Michael was responsible.
Who should go first?
Facing the prospect of successive trials, the DA had at his disposal one strategic lever. He got to decide the order in which the defendants would be tried. Before reading further, consider what you would have done? Who goes first?
The DA decided to try Carolyn first, followed by Michael. I think this was a wise strategy (and not just because it worked). At the time, I remember thinking how shrewd this was. Here's why:
Despite best efforts to select jurors in the second trial who are not informed about what happened in the first trial, it is impossible to do so with any confidence. Therefore, the DA had to think about the consequences of the first verdict on the second trial. The first step in the process is to consider the relative culpabilities of the two defendants.
Carolyn Riley is something of an enigma. She seems emotionally detached and not especially bright. There were times during recorded interviews when she didn't seem to really understand what was going on. While Carolyn certainly was not as caring towards her children as one would have hoped, she did not seem to have the mean streak that characterized Michael's personality. In many ways, she seemed to be in fear of her husband. Michael Riley had even been forced by court order to leave their family home at a previous location.
While it might have been a long-shot, it was not out of the question for Carolyn's defense team to mount an insanity defense. Who knows whether her kids were actually mentally ill in any way, but Carolyn clearly had some serious cognitive and emotional problems. So, while Carolyn seems to have actually performed more physical acts that contributed to Rebecca's death, she cut a more sympathetic figure than did her husband, Michael.
Consequences of First Trial on Second Jury
As a result of these factors, it seemed to be a safer bet to secure a conviction against Michael than against Carolyn. With this in mind, it definitely made sense to try Carolyn first. Consider the possible outcomes of Carolyn's trial. If she had been found not-guilty, the jury in Michael's trial would have felt particularly compelled to hold someone responsible for the senseless tragedy of Rebecca's death. If Carolyn had been found guilty of some lesser offense (as she was, in the end), the jury could certainly find room to decide that Michael was even more at fault. If Carolyn had been found guilty of first-degree murder, Michael's jury might have reasoned that he was at least as responsible and that fairness required the same verdict for him. So, trying Carolyn first would not interfere with the prosecution of Michael and might even help the case.
On the other hand, trying Michael first might have posed some problems for the prosecution against Carolyn. Had Michael been found not-guilty, Carolyn's jury would have likely considered it completely unfair to convict her of something for which her abusive husband got off scot-free. This dynamic pops up a lot in criminal cases. When an accomplice turns state's evidence and gets a cushy deal, a jury is sometimes reluctant to convict the defendant of anything too serious, on the grounds that the outcomes for the two are unfairly disparate. Jurors often don't even realize that they are applying such a "relative justice" metric.
Even if Michael Riley were tried first and convicted, Carolyn's trial team would play up the degree of dominance he exerted over the family. A juror who was looking for a reason to show mercy to Carolyn could seize on Michael's conviction as justification for leniency with respect to Carolyn. Since the "real bad guy" has already been convicted and Rebecca's murder will not go unpunished, a juror would be able to more easily justify (to herself and fellow jurors) going easy on Carolyn.
Applying Lessons Learned
It is, of course, easy to look brilliant playing Monday morning quarterback. The DA did, in fact, try Carolyn first. The defense never raised the issue of Carolyn's own mental state. The Commonwealth secured a conviction on Second Degree Murder. The subsequent trial of Michael Riley was quite unremarkable, relying on similar tactics as had been used unsuccessfully in Carolyn's trial. The two main defense tactics were to contest the Coroner's conclusion that Rebecca died from the drug overdose, rather than the pneumonia from which she was suffering, and pinning as much blame as possible on the Tufts staff psychologist who had prescribed Rebecca's medicine without conducting a thorough evaluation of the child. The major flaw in this approach was its failure to address the severe neglect of Rebecca in her final hours, as she begged for help while dying in her own home. At some level, I don't think the jurors cared as much about what killed her as they did about how her parents just let her die because they couldn't be bothered to get her medical care.
The outcomes of these cases, however, were far from a certainty. The DA did a good job, including the decision to try the defendants in the strategically sensible order. There is an important lesson here. Procedural decisions can have important strategic consequences. They should not be made lightly, or based solely on convenience.
When things go wrong with a pharmaceutical, it often triggers a whole series of lawsuits. A plaintiffs' attorney might have several cases against the same company. In addition to deciding on the best venue for bringing the suits, the lawyer should also think hard about the order in which she wants to bring the cases.
There is a high-profile case developing up here in Massachusetts, involving a high school student who hung herself after prolonged bullying by classmates. Criminal charges have been filed against nine different students, some of whom are charged as adults. The DA will have an interesting dilemma with respect to the order in which to prosecute these cases. Not all of the defendants are charged with the same crimes (a couple of boys are charged with statutory rape) and they seemed to have directed varying degrees of hostility towards the victim. It will be interesting to see the order in which the DA decides to proceed.
Recent Jury Box Blog Entries
Showing posts with label rebecca riley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rebecca riley. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Defense must play blame game in Rebecca Riley murder trial
The tragedy
Rebecca Riley, age 4, died in the throes of pneumonia, while very heavily medicated on Depakote and Clonidine, intended to treat ADHD and bipolar disorder. Her parents, Carolyn and Michael, are on trial for Rebecca's murder (Read about the trial here). According to prosecutors, Carolyn and Michael routinely lied to doctors in an effort to get all their children prescribed strong drugs, eventually finding a Boston psychiatrist willing to believe them and hand out ever-stronger doses. Prosecutors claim that the Rileys cared only about making their children easy to manage, regardless of any adverse health consequences, and collecting federal disability benefits. Eventually, after being given extremely high dosages of these powerful drugs, even by adult patient standards, Rebecca died in her parents' home.
When a tragedy like this strikes, it is quite natural for ordinary people to want to assign blame. Someone must have been responsible and that person should be held accountable. Why is there such a palpable need to assign blame? It stems from several reinforcing psychological phenomena.
The human need for answers and accountability
The first is a natural aversion to reminders of one's own mortality. We don't like to feel vulnerable. Therefore, when bad things -- deadly things -- happen to others, our brains automatically generate reasons why such threats aren't dangerous to us. A standard response is to generate distinctions between the victim's circumstances and our own. Some distinctions are circumstantial, while others are directed at choices made by the victim or some other responsible party.
A second psychological response to such a tragedy is to shrink back from the randomness of a bad event. We don't like to think that we are not in control of our own lives. We like to think that our own actions and choices will insure our own well-being. Therefore, people tend to overestimate the control that someone else could have exercised over a difficult situation. This is because any bystander would like to believe that, had she been in the same situation, she would have been able to stop the tragedy from occurring.
Finally, as I have written about on a number of occasions, hindsight bias is always at play when rare events take place. Ordinary people have a great deal of trouble processing the true chance of very unlikely events. The numbers just get too small for the brain to easily process. (What does a 1-in-500,000 chance really look like?). Also, the cognitive availability of an event (after all, the event is the focus of the trial) makes it seem more likely to have occurred. This tendency to overestimate the likelihood of an event also results in people overestimating the events predictability and preventability. An odd second-order effect is that the more peculiar the circumstances, the more likely people are to assume that a tragedy could have been averted.
Jurors are not experts in risk assessment. They typically don't have degrees in statistics or bioinformatics. They are ordinary folks, tasked with processing some very foreign circumstances. As such, they will be subject to the kinds of cognitive tendencies outlined above. The Rebecca Riley death is a very strange story. The loss of a young child is every parent's worst nightmare. The world of pediatric psychiatry seems very alien to all of the jurors. All of these factors will combine to make the jurors very eager to find someone to blame for this horrible tragedy. Once they assign blame, they can go back to believing that such a thing could never happen to them.
What should the defense team do?
This is the environment in which Carolyn and Michael Riley are being tried. One defense strategy might be to portray this death to the jury as an unfortunate accident. For the reasons I outline above, I think this will be an extremely tough sell. A better strategy would be to try to deflect blame onto others. Let the jurors have their culprit, but try to convince at least some of them that the culprit is someone other than the defendant.
The defense team took a sensible first step in this direction by requesting separate trials for the two parents. This allows each to deflect responsibility to the other. The key for Carolyn's legal team is to get at least some on the jury to assign more responsibility to her husband than to her. Frankly, based on what we have heard so far, such a tactic would seem more promising for Michael's defense than for Carolyn's.
The second likely candidate for deflected blame is the psychiatrist who prescribed the medication. Dr. Kayoko Kufuji has now testified in Carolyn's trial. While she came across as detached and somewhat clueless, which points to her own negligence, the prosecution did a very good job of showing how Dr. Kufuji relied very heavily on Carolyn Riley's own characterizations of her children, when making her diagnoses. As such, Kufuji's failures seem largely the result of Carolyn Riley's dishonesty and manipulation.
The third candidate for deflected blame, and the one I think is most likely to garner some sympathy with jurors, is Carolyn Riley's own mental state. The prosecutor is trying to paint a picture of a calculating, manipulative mother who happily endangered her children to keep them docile and to collect federal disability checks. The defense might just gain some traction by telling the jury that she was mentally unbalanced. There are official conditions, like Munchausen-by-proxy, where parents imagine or invent illnesses in their children to fulfill a pathological need for attention. Alternatively, the defense could attribute her extreme behavior to the abusive treatment by her husband. Michael Riley has been banned from a prior residence due to violent behavior and Carolyn Riley once took out a restraining order against her husband, ostensibly to protect her children. Under such a scenario, the defense can contend that the system let Carolyn down, enabling behavior that was not only self-destructive, but also endangered the Riley children.
Will it work?
Jurors are generally skeptical of victimization arguments like the one I outline above, but it seems the best strategy in a case like this. There is a documented history of spousal abuse. Many authority figures who interacted with Carolyn and her children failed to take official action. Remember that only one juror needs to be convinced that Carolyn Riley wasn't completely responsible for her own actions to avoid a murder conviction.
The defense strategy needs to be focused on getting Carolyn's sanity into the discussion in the jury room. They need to open the door for those who might be inclined to take pity on her. I rather doubt that the jury will initially be unanimous in its evaluation of her culpability. Arguments will be heated. Tears will be shed. Playing up the defendant's mental instability might not keep her out of jail, but I could see a conviction on a lesser included offense, such as involuntary manslaughter. Given what has transpired in court so far, that would probably be considered a victory for the defense.
Rebecca Riley, age 4, died in the throes of pneumonia, while very heavily medicated on Depakote and Clonidine, intended to treat ADHD and bipolar disorder. Her parents, Carolyn and Michael, are on trial for Rebecca's murder (Read about the trial here). According to prosecutors, Carolyn and Michael routinely lied to doctors in an effort to get all their children prescribed strong drugs, eventually finding a Boston psychiatrist willing to believe them and hand out ever-stronger doses. Prosecutors claim that the Rileys cared only about making their children easy to manage, regardless of any adverse health consequences, and collecting federal disability benefits. Eventually, after being given extremely high dosages of these powerful drugs, even by adult patient standards, Rebecca died in her parents' home.
When a tragedy like this strikes, it is quite natural for ordinary people to want to assign blame. Someone must have been responsible and that person should be held accountable. Why is there such a palpable need to assign blame? It stems from several reinforcing psychological phenomena.
The human need for answers and accountability
The first is a natural aversion to reminders of one's own mortality. We don't like to feel vulnerable. Therefore, when bad things -- deadly things -- happen to others, our brains automatically generate reasons why such threats aren't dangerous to us. A standard response is to generate distinctions between the victim's circumstances and our own. Some distinctions are circumstantial, while others are directed at choices made by the victim or some other responsible party.
A second psychological response to such a tragedy is to shrink back from the randomness of a bad event. We don't like to think that we are not in control of our own lives. We like to think that our own actions and choices will insure our own well-being. Therefore, people tend to overestimate the control that someone else could have exercised over a difficult situation. This is because any bystander would like to believe that, had she been in the same situation, she would have been able to stop the tragedy from occurring.
Finally, as I have written about on a number of occasions, hindsight bias is always at play when rare events take place. Ordinary people have a great deal of trouble processing the true chance of very unlikely events. The numbers just get too small for the brain to easily process. (What does a 1-in-500,000 chance really look like?). Also, the cognitive availability of an event (after all, the event is the focus of the trial) makes it seem more likely to have occurred. This tendency to overestimate the likelihood of an event also results in people overestimating the events predictability and preventability. An odd second-order effect is that the more peculiar the circumstances, the more likely people are to assume that a tragedy could have been averted.
Jurors are not experts in risk assessment. They typically don't have degrees in statistics or bioinformatics. They are ordinary folks, tasked with processing some very foreign circumstances. As such, they will be subject to the kinds of cognitive tendencies outlined above. The Rebecca Riley death is a very strange story. The loss of a young child is every parent's worst nightmare. The world of pediatric psychiatry seems very alien to all of the jurors. All of these factors will combine to make the jurors very eager to find someone to blame for this horrible tragedy. Once they assign blame, they can go back to believing that such a thing could never happen to them.
What should the defense team do?
This is the environment in which Carolyn and Michael Riley are being tried. One defense strategy might be to portray this death to the jury as an unfortunate accident. For the reasons I outline above, I think this will be an extremely tough sell. A better strategy would be to try to deflect blame onto others. Let the jurors have their culprit, but try to convince at least some of them that the culprit is someone other than the defendant.
The defense team took a sensible first step in this direction by requesting separate trials for the two parents. This allows each to deflect responsibility to the other. The key for Carolyn's legal team is to get at least some on the jury to assign more responsibility to her husband than to her. Frankly, based on what we have heard so far, such a tactic would seem more promising for Michael's defense than for Carolyn's.
The second likely candidate for deflected blame is the psychiatrist who prescribed the medication. Dr. Kayoko Kufuji has now testified in Carolyn's trial. While she came across as detached and somewhat clueless, which points to her own negligence, the prosecution did a very good job of showing how Dr. Kufuji relied very heavily on Carolyn Riley's own characterizations of her children, when making her diagnoses. As such, Kufuji's failures seem largely the result of Carolyn Riley's dishonesty and manipulation.
The third candidate for deflected blame, and the one I think is most likely to garner some sympathy with jurors, is Carolyn Riley's own mental state. The prosecutor is trying to paint a picture of a calculating, manipulative mother who happily endangered her children to keep them docile and to collect federal disability checks. The defense might just gain some traction by telling the jury that she was mentally unbalanced. There are official conditions, like Munchausen-by-proxy, where parents imagine or invent illnesses in their children to fulfill a pathological need for attention. Alternatively, the defense could attribute her extreme behavior to the abusive treatment by her husband. Michael Riley has been banned from a prior residence due to violent behavior and Carolyn Riley once took out a restraining order against her husband, ostensibly to protect her children. Under such a scenario, the defense can contend that the system let Carolyn down, enabling behavior that was not only self-destructive, but also endangered the Riley children.
Will it work?
Jurors are generally skeptical of victimization arguments like the one I outline above, but it seems the best strategy in a case like this. There is a documented history of spousal abuse. Many authority figures who interacted with Carolyn and her children failed to take official action. Remember that only one juror needs to be convinced that Carolyn Riley wasn't completely responsible for her own actions to avoid a murder conviction.
The defense strategy needs to be focused on getting Carolyn's sanity into the discussion in the jury room. They need to open the door for those who might be inclined to take pity on her. I rather doubt that the jury will initially be unanimous in its evaluation of her culpability. Arguments will be heated. Tears will be shed. Playing up the defendant's mental instability might not keep her out of jail, but I could see a conviction on a lesser included offense, such as involuntary manslaughter. Given what has transpired in court so far, that would probably be considered a victory for the defense.
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