EXPERT WITNESS: Mockingbird continued

Michael G. Brock, MA, LMSW, is a forensic mental health professional in private practice at Counseling and Evaluation Services in Wyandotte, Michigan. He has worked in the mental health field since 1974, and has been in full-time private practice since 1985. Much of his practice in recent years relates to driver license restoration and substance abuse evaluation, but he also consults and serves as an expert witness regarding forensic interviewing and the use of forensic interviewing protocols in cases of child sexual abuse allegations. He may be contacted at Michael G. Brock, Counseling and Evaluation Services, 2514 Biddle, Wyandotte, 48192; 313-802-0863, fax/phone 734-692-1082; e-mail: michaelgbrock@comcast.net, website, michaelgbrock.com.
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FOOTNOTES
1 To Kill a Mockingbird, Copyright © 1960 by Harper Lee, Copyright © renewed 1988 by Harper Lee, https://cleveracademy.vn/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/To-Kill-a-Mockingbird.pdf, Published by arrangement with McIntosh and Otis, Inc.
2 The Reflections on Lie was first published in New York, in the first issue of Renaissance, a quarterly journal published by the Free School of Higher Studies (Volume I, Issue I, January-March 1943). They were then published in English in the June 1945 issue of Contemporary Jewish Record, a magazine of the American Jewish Committee under the title “The Political Function of the Modern Lie.”  http://aejcpp.free.fr/articles/koyre_mensonge.htm
3…”the lie is a weapon. The favorite weapon of the inferior and the weak who, by deceiving the adversary asserts itself and takes revenge on him…To deceive is also to humiliate, which explains the often gratuitous lie...”
4 “In the South, an estimated two or three blacks were lynched each week in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Mississippi alone, 500 blacks were lynched from the 1800s to 1955. Nationwide, the figure climbed to nearly 5,000.” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/emmett-lynching-america/
5 As recently as 1959 a song lyric (The Long Black Veil, songwirters Danny Dill / Marijohn Wilkin © Universal Music Publishing Group) was recorded (and has been covered since) in which a man goes silently to the gallows rather than tarnish a woman’s honor, “I spoke not a word, thou it meant my life / For I’d been in the arms of my best friend’s wife…”
6 P. 182 [Scout] whispered to [brother] Jem, “Has she got good sense?”
Jem was squinting down at the witness stand. “Can’t tell yet,” he said. “She’s got enough sense to get the judge sorry for her, but she might be just—oh, I don’t know.”
7 Sen. Hirono: “Men Need To ‘Shut Up,’ Kavanaugh Accuser Needs To Be Believed And I Believe Her,” Real Clear Politics 9/18/2018, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/09/18/sen_hirono_on_kavanaugh_men_need_to_shut_up_accuser_needs_to_be_believed_and_i_believe_her.html
8 Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska
9 “…I hope that we have all learned something, that we owe it to the victims of sexual assault to do more and to do better and to do it now with them…”  Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s Senate speech on why she opposed Kavanaugh, Anchorage Daily News, 10/5/2018
10 TO: All Republican Senators, FROM: Rachel Mitchell, Nominations Investigative Counsel United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, DATE: September 30, 2018, RE: Analysis of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s Allegations https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4952147/180930-Rachel-Mitchell-Memo-Kavanaugh.pdf
11 “Last night at the President’s State of the Union Address, I was honored to invite as my guest Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student who has inspired us all with her performance art piece Carry That Weight in which she carries her mattress everywhere she goes to symbolize the burden she carries every single day as long as her rapist is still on campus.” Carrying Their Weight: Giving Voice to Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault, Kirsten Gillibrand, Huffington Post, 1/21/2015 11:51 am ET Updated Mar 23, 2015.  https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-kirsten-gillibrand/carrying-their-weight-giv_b_6516630.html
12 Gillibrand on Ford’s Allegation: ‘I Believe Her Because She’s Telling the Truth’ by Jack Crowe, The National Review, September 20, 2018 2:36 PM
13 Scientific proofs in hard sciences can be replicated to a high degree; social science experiments at a much lower level, probably because they are typically more subject to the experimenter’s confirmation bias, a concept we have discussed in previous articles.  Moreover, for use as “applied science” a hard science experiment has to be reproducible virtually 100% of the time.  Without this reproducibility, there could be no mass production of machinery.
14 https://www.apa.org/research/ action/polygraph.aspx
15 Adults Judgment of Children’s Coached Reports (Talwar, Lee, Bala and Lindsay), which appeared in the Journal of Law and Human Behavior, October 2006.  The authors conducted a study which indicated that adults were very poor at assessing children’s coached vs. true reports, and were actually more likely to believe children who were coached: “In this study, adults were only able to detect children’s coached true and false reports at chance level. Initially, they tended to have a “truth” bias: adults believed children’s testimony regardless of actual truthfulness. Overall, our results are consistent with the findings of previous research, and suggest that in general adults are unable to accurately discriminate between true and false reports in children merely by observing the children testify…children may be easily coached to tell convincing stories and coaching makes it harder for adults to detect the truth of their testimony…Adults rated girls as capable witnesses significantly more than they did boys, and adults were more likely to believe that girls were telling the truth, even though they were not. These findings are consistent with the existing reports that adults are more likely to consider girls as truth-tellers than boys despite research suggesting that girls are as likely to tell lies as boys.” (emphasis mine)
16 February 16, 2007, Judge frees teacher in sex case, Ferndale Man in Alleged Assaults of Boys Will Get Retrial with New Witnesses and Evidence. Mike Martindale / The Detroit News
17 https://www.michigan.gov/documents/dhs/DHS-PUB-0779_211637_7.pdf
18 “In criminal cases, the importance of science (and understanding the limits of science) cannot be gainsaid. The statistics are clear: in a review of homicide cases in Cleveland, Ohio, the clearance rate was higher [63.1%] for cases with probative results—either matches or exclusions—than in cases without such evidence [56.3%], and the average sentence imposed was higher in the former category. Yet there is a confounding problem – the consumers of forensic evidence have little or no scientific training, either at the college level or ‘on the job.’ Perhaps 5% of lawyers [and judges] studied science, a number presented in research papers and confirmed repeatedly by polling attendees at legal education conferences. And the consequences are severe.”–When Must Lawyers Learn Science? Jules Epstein, The Judicial Edge, January 21st, 2016
19 Detection of Deception, Boyd, McLearen, Meyer, and Denney, 2007, P. 32 (internal cites omitted)
20 Numbers 35:30 New International Version (NIV), “Anyone who kills a person is to be put to death as a murderer only on the testimony of witnesses. But no one is to be put to death on the testimony of only one witness.”
21 Deuteronomy 1:15-17 New International Version (NIV)—”So I took the leading men of your tribes, wise and respected men, and appointed them to have authority over you—as commanders of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties and of tens and as tribal officials.  And I charged your judges at that time, ‘Hear the disputes between your people and judge fairly, whether the case is between two Israelites or between an Israelite and a foreigner residing among you.  Do not show partiality in judging; hear both small and great alike. Do not be afraid of anyone, for judgment belongs to God. Bring me any case too hard for you, and I will hear it.’”
22 “And no future tyrant is likely to imitate Hitler’s mad doctrinairism, which caused him to send Jewish scientists to his enemies to insure his defeat.” The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom, P. 297-298
23 Why Democrats Are Abandoning Israel, by KC Johnson, August 18, 2017, The Washington Post, “Even as backing for Israel from rank-and-file Democrats faded, until recently nearly all elected Democrats remained steadfastly supportive. But the actions of Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) in recent weeks indicate that ambitious elected Democrats are now starting to fall in line and adopt a far less pro-Israel position.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/08/18/why-democrats-have-soured-on-israel/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2c82f5d6be7a
24 Poll: Democratic Support For Israel, Palestinians Nearly Identical, The times of Israel, By TOI Staff and AP, 23 January 2018, 10:20 pm https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-democratic-support-for-israel-palestinians-nearly-identical/
25 “The questions being asked today by ACLU board members is this: is it good or bad for the Left, is it good or bad for Democrats, is it good or bad for women, is it good or bad for people of color, is it good or bad for gays?  These are reasonable questions to be asked by groups dedicated to the welfare of these groups but not by a group purportedly dedicated to civil liberties for all. A true civil libertarian transcends identity politics and cares about the civil liberties of one’s political enemies because he or she recognizes that this is the only way that civil liberties for everyone will be preserved.” Alan Dershowitz: ACLU’s opposition to Brett Kavanaugh sounds its death knell, by Alan Dershowitz, Washington examiner, October 08, 2018 10:59 AM
26 “Booker: Doesn’t Matter If Kavanaugh Is ‘Innocent Or Guilty,’ Trump Should Nominate Someone Else”—Posted By Ian Schwartz, Real Clear Politics, October 2, 2018
27 What the Black Men Who Identify With Brett Kavanaugh Are Missing, When men of color see themselves in the embattled Supreme Court justice, they’re not seeing the bigger picture.  OCT 12, 2018, Jemele Hill, Staff writer for The Atlantic
28 The Black Men Who Identify with Brett Kavanaugh Understand the Stakes, by David French, National Review, October 12, 2018 2:31 PM
29 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= btcnDqqdWeU
30https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/10/06/murkowski_explains_kavanaugh_no_vote_in_my_conscience_i_could_not_vote_for_him.html