Disclaimer: This article is in response to questions frequently asked of Mr. Cobb and is an unedited dictation transcript. Just like talk to text on your smartphone, there may be misspelled words or sentence fragments.
No, that does not work at all for someone to plead mercy in a criminal case. If someone tries to just come up to reason as for why they should not go to jail or prison on their own, we call it my kids, my babies, my job, my reasons, that is not a legal reason at all. They run into a very simple problem: the law does not work that way. Unfortunately, most of what people know about the criminal justice system is informed by media of some kind. Virtually every time I have watched a movie, a television show, or even a play involving courtroom drama in criminal cases, I have had to shake my head because virtually nothing that you see in the media is correct, and this can hurt people.
Are Florida’s Criminal Justice Treatment Plans A Viable Plea Bargaining Option?
Florida’s criminal justice treatment programs are an embarrassment to the criminal justice system as a whole, and to the scientific method in principle. They are not scientifically based. A classic example is post-DUI arrest alcohol counseling. Anyone who gets arrested for a DUI in Florida has to attend and complete DUI and alcohol education just to get a hardship license, regardless of the outcome of the case in court. Unfortunately, Florida’s DUI educational program and the counseling attached with it are so ineffective and fail so often that Florida created a level two for multi-offender DUI defendants. Multi-offender DUI School, as it is called, fails just as often.
The worst example is probably drug court. Drug court is a twelve step program. Unfortunately, from what we can tell, twelve step programs have an effectiveness rate of about five to eight percent which is terrible. It is unbelievably terrible, and that is the problem with virtually any type of treatment program that Florida has. It begins with the diagnostic method. Imagine that you have a child that you have known since birth. You do not let your child play on the roof of the car, however, during one particular day your child, in fact, does play on the roof of a car, falls off, is injured, and based on knowing your child since birth, you think the arm might be broken, specifically the left arm.
Being a responsible parent, you take your child to the emergency room. When you finally speak to the doctor, the doctor says, “Oh fell off the roof of a car”. I know exactly what to do. When children fall off the roofs of cars we always put a red cast on their right leg. As a parent you sit there scratching your head and going red cast, right leg, the left arm is the problem. You do not even know how to comprehend that. You are looking in every part of your brain trying to figure out something about what the doctor said in a way that makes sense because what the doctor just said made no sense at all and you are thinking that does not sound right. Let me ask a question. “Doctor, do you think an x-ray on the left arm would be a good idea instead of a red cast on the right leg which isn’t injured?” “Oh no”, says the doctor, “We put a red cast on a right leg for everybody”.
You would immediately take your child out of there because that is one of the craziest things you will ever hear if you, in fact, do hear it come out of a child’s mouth. Yet, that is precisely what is going on in Florida’s criminal justice system. The diagnostic profile does not fit what is going on in someone’s head. If someone is charged with a DUI they go to DUI counseling. If someone is charged with battery and it is not a domestic battery, then they will attend a twelve-week program of anger management. If someone is charged with domestic battery, they go to batter’s intervention program of some kind for twenty-six to twenty-nine weeks. Notice that the criminal justice system’s response is one size fits all in every case.
There is no meaningful diagnostics. It is literally like the doctor putting a red cast on the right leg of every single child that ever falls off of a car no matter what part of the body was injured. It does not make any sense. And that is exactly what we have going on in Florida. That is exactly what is wrong with these treatment programs, and unfortunately, they are often dangled as the biggest scam the State of Florida is pulling in the criminal justice system right now. That scam is the diversion program. Diversion programs look too good to be true for a reason, they are. If someone needs help because they have some kind of a brain problem, it only makes logical sense that they have a proper diagnostic evaluation before somebody is giving them potentially dangerous and life-threatening medications, or other treatments that do not work and could potentially cause problems not only for them but for the public as a whole.
That is precisely what we have going on. Unqualified politicians dispensing medical and counseling advice through the legal system. The failure rate is atrocious. Now the graduation rate is outstanding simply because they use drug testing and all sorts of jail threats to get people to hold off on giving into those cravings. Unfortunately, because they have not solved the problem, the reason there is a craving in the first place, that person will go back to using illegal and prescription drugs, alcohol, or whatever, more than eighty percent of the time because the legal system failed to properly diagnose and treat that problem. We need to break the paradigm of crime and punishment.
This is not 1616 anymore. I know a lot of people in the legal profession have trouble with this, but it is 2016. It is time to use the science we have and help people, and this is precisely why I use SPECT brain imaging as part of the specialized treatment departure ground authorized under Florida law.
Disclaimer: This article is in response to questions frequently asked of Mr. Cobb and is an unedited dictation transcript. Just like talk to text on your smartphone, there may be misspelled words or sentence fragments.
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