The Anatomy of Violence (55 page)

One
argument rests on the belief that we all have free will and agency even in the face of risk factors. It’s almost a religious belief. Surely we all have a choice? If I were to ask you to explain why you are reading this book right now, you’d say something like, “Well, I wanted something to read today and decided to pick up your book. I’ve always been fascinated by violence, and these days we’re hearing a lot more about the brain and biology. So here I am now.”

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? You can choose. You have free will. I was not standing beside you with a gun to your head coercing you to buy it, was I? Surely this has to be full-bodied proof of free will? No, it’s not.

You did not choose to read this book. Your brain made you do it. You likely had “risk factors” for buying this book, whether you are conscious of them or not. You may have been a victim of crime. You may have yourself bordered on committing a crime—and always wondered
where the line between offenders and good citizens lay. Alternatively you were born good, giving you the fascination for the bad seed that you are not. You may have been exposed to domestic violence and abuse. If you are a woman, we know you are more attracted to books on crime than men—likely because you have a greater fear of being a victim. These factors produce a causal chain of events that predisposed you to read this book. You saw the bold title and colorful cover. In milliseconds it triggered a chain of past emotional memories and associations that made you pick up the book and start reading its contents.

You want so desperately to believe that you determine things in your life, yet that belief has no true substance. It floats like a ghost in a mind machine forged by ancient evolutionary forces. You were as helpless in deciding to buy this book as I was in writing it.

Even if you decide to put this book down right now to prove me wrong, it wasn’t you that chose to close it. It was your Bolshie brain that was programmed to be oppositional and defiant when challenged. Free will is sadly an illusion—a mirage. I wish it were not, because I too find this perspective unsettling. But there we have it.

Here’s another example. We know that
alcoholism is a disease state that has a substantial genetic component. If we sit an alcoholic and a nonalcoholic in front of a glass of beer and tell them not to drink it—then yes, in some sense they do indeed “choose” to drink it or not. But in a probabilistic sense we also know that the alcoholic is going to be less able to resist drinking from the glass. In this situation, the alcoholic’s freedom of will has been constrained in large part by genetic, biological, and, to be sure, environmental forces beyond his control. Offenders like Donta Page are no different.

Okay, you say, so Page has a whole bunch of risk factors for violence. Sure, he got a rough deal in life. But he’s still as responsible as anyone. If an individual possesses characteristics that make him disproportionately more likely to commit violence, then he has to take
responsibility for those predisposing factors. Just as an alcoholic knows he has a drinking problem and must seek out treatment, so the person at risk for violence needs to recognize those risk factors and take preventive steps to ensure that he doesn’t harm others. He has a choice, and he needs to act. He is responsible.

This makes good practical sense, but there is a problem with this argument. Responsibility and self-reflection are not disembodied, ethereal processes but are instead rooted firmly in the brain. Functional
imaging research has shown that the medial prefrontal cortex is centrally involved in the ability to engage in
self-reflection.
¹⁷
And it is this very area of the brain that has been repeatedly found to be structurally and
functionally impaired in antisocial, violent, and psychopathic offenders. Similarly, patients who have damage to the medial prefrontal cortex are known to become irresponsible, to lack self-discipline, and to reflect less on the consequences of their actions. The very mechanisms that subserve the ability to take responsibility for one’s actions were impaired in Donta Page. If you take a look at
Figure 10.1
in the color-plate section, you can see very clearly the reduced medial prefrontal cortical functioning. He is less capable than the rest of us to reflect on his behavior, to recognize factors that place him at risk for violence, and to take responsibility for those risk factors and seek treatment.

Let’s step back and consider the counter to my own court testimony. Aren’t we treading into legal quicksand if we accept the biosocial argument for clemency to Donta Page? Let’s concede that genes place the bullets in the gun. I’ll admit that the environment cocks the trigger. But surely it is your choice whether to pull the trigger?

Scientifically, I take a more deterministic—and some would say pessimistic—perspective. If there are people stumbling around with a loaded, cocked gun all the time, somebody for sure is going to get shot. We cannot prove that brain impairments cause violence, but as with Page, we can come close.

But your retort is that these offenders must have
some
degree of insight into their loaded-gun condition, and must know there’s something just not right with them. Based in part on the four years I worked with prison inmates, I’m not so sure. Most prisoners whom I suspected to have brain dysfunction simply had no idea that anything was wrong with them. This is not entirely surprising when you consider the neurodevelopmental basis to violence, with brain mechanisms not developing normally throughout childhood and adolescence. In many cases these offenders grew up with brain dysfunction, so it has always been an intrinsic part of them. Even when their biological dysfunction is pointed out to them, like many of the general public they believe that the causes of violence nevertheless lie squarely in social factors like poverty, unemployment, bad influences, poor parenting, and child abuse. That’s what they have grown up to believe. I think that these offenders and some of you think that way because poverty and bad parenting can be objectively seen and recognized, and are consequently very salient—whereas
biological risk factors are invisible to the naked eye. Yet the neurobiological reality is that many offenders, like
Phineas Gage, and individuals with
Alzheimer’s disease, have brain impairments and cannot objectively evaluate their own minds.

But even if offenders knew they were at risk for violence, the way society is constructed precludes them from doing anything about it. Even if Donta Page had been able to recognize and comprehend the implications of the many factors that placed him at high risk for impulsive violence, what was he going to do about it? Go to the police and tell them he felt like
raping someone?
¹⁸
We know what the societal response to that would be, and you cannot blame an individual for not wanting to be locked up for a long time in prison. There are no self-help groups for foresightful criminals.

In reading over the case of Donta Page, you may have been reminded of a friend, an acquaintance, or even a family member who might have had some biological and social risk factors for crime, and yet they did not succumb. So you say, surely there must be something profoundly wrong with this actuarial approach of weighing degrees of risk for violence.

The
counterargument? The concept of
protective factors. That person sticking out in your memory with all those risk factors for crime likely had positive influences on their lives—factors
protecting
them from future crime in the face of the biosocial bogeymen. For example, positive family functioning can protect a child from antisocial behavior in the face of living in a community with a high level of violence.
¹⁹
Or, conversely, I have shown that good fear conditioning
²⁰
and high levels of arousal
²¹
serve as biological factors that protect a child from adult crime even when that child was antisocial during the teenage years. These protective factors helped them along a different course, but not necessarily because they had exerted “free will.”

There is a side of me that would argue that Page should not have been punished as fully as he could have been in the eyes of the law. There are limitations to his free will that we should take into account when sentencing criminals like him. We are not all the same.

Let’s now argue the other side of the case we have before us. There is a compelling reason that we should be unwilling to let Page off the hook,
despite all the risk factors he had against him. Retribution—the mainstay philosophy within the legal system for justifying the punishment of an offender.
Peyton Tuthill had her throat cut and died in a pool of her own blood after enduring a horrific rape. Should not the victim’s cries for justice be heard and a pound of flesh rendered?

You almost certainly have been a victim of crime at some point—a
burglary, a robbery, a theft, or an assault. Do you remember the outrage and injustice you felt? The unwillingness to forgive? The instinct to demand an eye for an eye? Justice exists to address a victim’s powerful psychological need for retribution. If we were to take tough retributive justice away and replace it with softer sentencing, would that not leave a bitter aftertaste of injustice in the mouths of the victims?

I’ve presented to you the case for clemency for Donta Page, but now let us go through the hard facts of the
rape
and murder. This will not be as vivid as it would be were you sitting in the jury box at the trial, facing the photographs and forensic testimony, but perhaps it will give you pause before rendering your verdict—and help you better understand the retributivist’s position.

First and foremost, Peyton Tuthill was a truly wonderful young woman. As an undergraduate at the College of Charleston, in South Carolina, she had been a cheerleader, athlete, lifeguard, and sorority president. She worked as a drug-abuse peer counselor. She volunteered in a convalescent home for the elderly. She had an intense sense of social responsibility toward the less fortunate. She worked selflessly during her studies to help underprivileged minorities—mentoring children from very poor homes and organizing the “adoption” of five of them by her sorority. When she left college she moved out to Denver to eventually attend the Colorado Institute of Art. While she waited, she registered at a temporary employment agency for work—I know all too well what that is like. Ironically, she had even visited the
Stout Street Foundation, where Donta Page lived, and spoken to officials there about drug and alcohol rehabilitation. She was considering volunteering for them and perhaps might have even helped in Page’s rehabilitation. More ironically, they had reassured her that where she lived was quite safe, and that if she ever needed help she should get in touch.

On February 24, 1999, she went to an interview with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Meanwhile, Donta Page was back at the Stout Street treatment center waiting for a lift to the bus station for his
one-way trip back to prison in Maryland. He had two hours to kill before his ride, and impulsively decided to
burglarize a nearby home.

Returning from her interview, Peyton parked her car outside her duplex. When she entered the house she encountered Page. Terrified, she ran upstairs. Page chased after her, catching her at the top of the stairs, where he proceeded to punch her several times in the face. He hit her hard on the head with the butt end of the knife he had taken from the kitchen drawer. Blood splatters on the railing, floor, and wall showed that she was cut here. As her dog barked loudly in one closed upstairs room, Page dragged Peyton into another bedroom. He tied her hands with cord, and asked where her money was. She told him it was in her purse in her car outside.

Page went out for the money. Peyton, meanwhile, got her hands loose and ran downstairs, seemingly free of her ordeal. But she encountered Page for a second time, as he was coming back up the stairs. With no way out, she ran into the bedroom again. Page followed. He stripped her of her blouse and panties, and raped her on the bed. He raped her vaginally, then he raped her anally. Blood marks down the wall indicate that her head, bleeding from the wound she had received on the stairs, was banging up against the wall in what must have been a truly horrendous ordeal for her.

In his confession tape, Page revealed that Peyton’s terrible screams ultimately drove him to kill her.
²²
He pulled her to the edge of the bed into a sitting position, took the kitchen knife, and cut her throat. Blood gushed from the wound—but she still screamed, desperately fighting for her life. Bravely she struggled against a man more than twice her size. She grabbed the knife, but it severed the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. Page tried to silence her again—this time by plunging the knife twice into her chest.

She still would not give up. Standing up valiantly against her assailant, she suffered two more knife wounds. One ran deep, with the blade plunging eight inches into her chest, cutting major blood vessels around her heart. Peyton staggered forward two or three steps, and then collapsed. The coroner testified that it likely took another minute before her wretched ordeal was over and she died in a pool of her own blood. Page returned to Stout Street just in time to catch his 1:30 p.m. bus.

The mother of Peyton Tuthill would later say that her daughter was not killed, but that she was “butchered”—like an animal. Should we really excuse Page after he slaughtered this wonderful, charitable
woman who was only just beginning her life? She had given unceasingly to underprivileged minority children—and, paradoxically, it was an underprivileged minority child who as an adult paid her back with this bestial treatment. Her life was snuffed out in hideous fashion by a vicious thug. Imagine Peyton as your best friend, your girlfriend, your sister, or your daughter. Can you imagine the pain, fear, and humiliation she must have suffered? If a defendant ever deserved what is a justifiable legal punishment under the law, then surely Page deserves it. Even that punishment would be far more humane than what Peyton was forced to undergo.