The Anatomy of Violence

by Adrian Raine

  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 conditioning20 and high levels of arousal21 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.

  RETRIBUTION REIGNS

  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 we
nt 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.

  Let’s take another example. I’ll call him Fred Haltoil. Fred was brought up in an abusive household and, according to his sister, was thrashed by a bad-tempered father who had little if any understanding of his son. His home life was traumatic, with four of his siblings who didn’t survive beyond childhood. The antagonism between father and son was long-standing and bitter. His family moved repeatedly. Like many offenders he failed in school—having been expelled from one—and left education at the age of sixteen without a diploma. He joined the military, where he proved to be a fearless soldier who fought courageously for his country during wartime. Fred took up one of the most dangerous positions—as a message runner—and was gassed in the process. Hospitalized, he was blind for a month and suffered post-traumatic stress disorder for his near-death experience.23 Perhaps not surprisingly, like many war veterans his emotional compassion for others was blunted as a result of his traumatic war experiences.

  Demobilized, Fred was unemployed and slept part of the time in shelters for the homeless, moving around from place to place.24 Lacking education and useful life skills, he had no true sense of direction or ambition. His social dysfunction was such that he was never able to develop an intimate physical relationship with another person. His repeated attempts to normalize his life by unrealistic applications for art school and architecture were inevitably unsuccessful, given his lack of training and true talent. He was on a downward spiral. After serving a five-year prison term,25 he, like Page, went on to become a killer after his release.

  Given the same option that the judges of Donta Page had between the death penalty and life in prison without the possibility of parole for this murderer, would you as a juror spare Fred the death penalty? I think many of you would. He had a lot of the risk factors for violence—child abuse, negative home background, traumatic life events with the early illnesses and deaths of his siblings, school failure and expulsion, unemployment and occupational failure, homelessness, and major trauma exposure. Like Page, does he not deserve some degree of clemency?

  Perhaps not for Fred Haltoil—alias Adolf Hitler—who was responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and many millions more. There’s no question that Hitler was not a good man. His best defense lawyer would have had to admit that he pushed the envelope a bit when it came to social policy. Like Page, he was at best a flawed character, and at worst an inhuman monster. For any other killer, we might show mercy. But could you ever excuse Adolf Hitler?

  In case you are willing to show mercy to Hitler and those like him who perpetrated genocide—Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin—bear in mind that American society is wired differently than you are. James Castle, the defense attorney of Donta Page, offered to enter the plea of guilty on all charges and receive a life sentence without the possibility of parole before the trial began. Page would never again be free to terrorize anyone outside of prison. Despite this, the prosecution pressed for the death penalty and went to trial—at great expense to you. Clearly this mind-set goes well beyond the protection of society and into the realm of costly retribution.

  Are we wired for retribution? I believe that we evolved to have inside us deep-rooted feelings of retribution and rage at those selfish psychopaths who cheat on our civilized rules of social engagement, and who ruthlessly exploit our charity and trust. Without that powerful emotional mechanism to motivate rage and righteous indignation against these offenders, our current-day civilized society would not exist. If we forgave psychopaths we would be overrun by them. We need to hold a grudge. There is surely something to be said for simmering retribution as a mainstay of our society.

  You may alternatively have bought into the risk-factors argument for clemency I have given you. You may stand unswayed by the retributive argument. Others will feel differently. I can understand—I used to feel just like you. Why do people differ in their views? If you, unlike others, feel in favor of clemency, perhaps unlike Peyton Tuthill you have not had your throat cut recently.

  You’ll recall from the Introduction my own feelings of being a victim of violence and the Jekyll-and-Hyde debate I have with myself today. That scientifically trained alter ego has spent his life trying to stop crime by working out what causes it and then developing treatments. He’s spent four years of his life holed up in top-security prisons helping the dregs of society, running the gauntlet of the prison hierarchy from murderers and bank robbers at the top to pedophiles at the bottom. He’s even argued that recidivistic crime is a clinical disorder and that we should go easier on those that we hit the hardest. And he is resolute in his belief—based on the body of scientific evidence that has been amassed—that early risk factors beyond the individual’s control help launch some into criminal careers. He urges all of us to take a hard look at the scientific evidence, and not to let our instincts and emotions hijack our rational thinking.

  And yet—can I really forgive? Can I forget? Can I let slip for just once my evolutionary instincts that yearn for revenge and retribution? The Amish apparently could when Charles Roberts shot ten of their little girls in a schoolhouse in Lancaster County, down the road from me in Pennsylvania. That community’s response to this despicable act was:

  I don’t think there’s anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts.26

  The Amish visited the killer’s family to express their forgiveness and even set up a fund for them. I was brought up a Catholic and always admired Jesus Christ, so why can’t I have his sense of forgiveness and resolve to turn the other cheek? And if you find it hard to believe the response of the Amish, can you more easily believe that others criticized their response as misguided and tantamount to denyin
g the existence of evil?27, 28

  So I argue back and forth with myself on this perspective, first arguing one side, and then the other. It sounds a little crazy, but it’s really all right to talk to yourself—as long as you don’t interrupt! And perhaps there is a bit of Jekyll and Hyde inside many of us. The ultimate challenge arises in how to reconcile these conflicting perspectives within ourselves to develop a compromise position. We’ll return to this issue further when we turn to the future of neurocriminology in the next chapter. But right now let’s return to our starting point—the two case studies that may help shape our perspective and judgment on the Jekyll-and-Hyde debate.

  TURNING BACK A PAGE TO OFT

  Some of us have felt the double-edged sword that neurocriminology offers up to us. Peyton Tuthill forcefully felt the sharp edge of the blade. I felt the same edge, but far more lightly. Tuthill’s mother, Pat, vents against the violence done to her daughter. My Mr. Hyde rages for revenge.

  Yet is there a blunter edge to the blade that can soften these retributive feelings, and give us pause for thought on punishment? Perhaps the medical model, with its Hippocratic oath of doing no harm, can help render a more benign judgment on this tortuous issue. Let’s look back both at Donta Page and also at our point of departure, Mr. Oft.

  The medical information on Donta Page’s early life—as well as his brain scan in adulthood—did not deter the jury from finding him responsible and rendering him guilty of first-degree deliberate murder, first-degree felony murder, first-degree sexual assault, first-degree burglary, and aggravated robbery against Peyton Tuthill. But would it make a difference in deciding whether he should live or die? In Colorado, on February 20, 2001, this question was decided at Page’s sentencing hearing by a panel of three judges who had to weigh the evidence and make a fateful decision. Would Page be held fully responsible for his acts and be executed by lethal injection? Or would they accept the biosocial argument that factors early in his life, beyond his control, led him down the path to violence? Should these facts mitigate the punishment, resulting in prison without the possibility of parole?