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Future Dangerousness

By Steve Hall

"Longtime expert witness unreliable, court says," is the report in today's Austin American-Statesman.  It's written by Steven Kreytak. In his decades working as a forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Coons of Austin has testified at dozens of death penalty trials across Texas in which he opined about how defendants would behave in the future. In Travis County, prosecutors called him in the past year to testify during the sentencing trials of killers Milton Gobert and Paul Devoe. Coons pronounced that, in his expert opinion, both men would be a future danger. They both received the death penalty. Coons' paid testimony at those trials and others could get new scrutiny after the Court of Criminal Appeals ruled last week ? in a Waco death penalty case ? that Coons' methodology for predicting future dangerousness is not reliable...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on October 19, 2010 (boomark / email).