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From the Los Angeles Times

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Assisted suicide or murder? Jury faces tough issues in grisly stabbing

The suspect in motivational speaker Jeffrey Locker's multiple-stabbing death says the victim asked him to 'commit a Kevorkian.' Prosecutors don't disagree but still call it murder.

by Tina Susman, Los Angeles Times

February 20, 2011

Reporting from New York

Nobody disputes that Kenneth Minor held the knife that ripped into the chest of Jeffrey Locker in July 2009 as Locker, a motivational speaker, sat in his car with his hands tied behind his back.

Locker, 52, who appeared to have a good life — a loving wife, three children, a nice home in a comfortable suburb — died that night, slumped behind the wheel of his shiny black Dodge in what was thought to be a vicious murder and robbery. But jurors hearing the case that opened last week in New York must decide whether Minor was a coldblooded killer or a mere tool in an extraordinary plan by Locker to arrange his own murder — a claim that sounds outlandish, except that prosecutors have conceded much of it is true.

Nearly a year after Locker's death, they dropped first-degree murder and robbery charges against Minor, who says Locker used his motivational speaking talents to persuade him to do the unthinkable: tie his hands with a telephone cord and hold the knife steady as Locker repeatedly impaled himself on it. His alleged motivation: to ensure his family collected millions of dollars in life insurance that would not be paid if his death were ruled a suicide.

"To make his plan work, he had to put out a contract on his own life," said prosecutor Peter Casolaro. Minor now faces second-degree murder charges in a case that raises the question of whether it ever is acceptable to help someone who is not terminally ill to die, even if the person asks for it.

During three days of jury selection, many potential jurors were disqualified when they said they could not convict a person who helped another commit suicide. "I believe in euthanasia," said one. Another cited the "very, very long and painful death" of his father and said he wished it had been legal to help him die.

Advocates of euthanasia say the case points up the difference between helping someone who is not dying commit suicide and helping a dying patient end suffering.

"We're not talking about some lunatic being asked to hold a knife while you jump on it. That's ridiculous," said Geoffrey Fieger, who represented pathologist Jack Kevorkian against criminal charges related to his assistance in the deaths of the terminally ill.

Kathryn Tucker, the legal director of Compassion & Choices, which advocates for the right of terminally ill people to expedite their deaths, said there is a huge difference between what Minor did and what her group supports.

"This distraught man whose financial ruin pitched him into a desire for death is clearly different from a lucid, competent cancer patient who is suffering unbearably," Tucker said of Locker, whose business had collapsed during the recession. "I think everyone can understand that."

Nonetheless, in opening statements Thursday, defense attorney Daniel Gotlin made clear he hopes to capitalize on the difficulties people might have separating the issues. "The guy wanted to commit a Kevorkian," he said of Locker, borrowing Minor's words in statements to police after his arrest.

There have been other cases of accused killers using "assisted suicide" as a defense, with varying degrees of success. Most have involved terminally ill people whose loved ones claimed they wanted to die. The most famous involved Kevorkian, the former Michigan doctor who was tried four times for helping the terminally ill die before being convicted of second-degree murder in 1999. He was paroled in 2007.

Perhaps no case is as bizarre as this one, which unfolded in the predawn hours of July 16, 2009, when Locker drove his station wagon from Woodmere, on Long Island, into Manhattan's East Harlem neighborhood. In the previous seven months, the recession's effect on his motivational speaking business had become clear. The money in his bank accounts had plunged from $87,012 to $5,817. He had maxed out his credit cards. He had three teenagers, including one in college, to support, and was accused of benefiting from profits made in an associate's Ponzi scheme.

"He was ready to hire a killer" to end it all, said Casolaro, who has conceded that investigations revealed Locker bought $14 million in life insurance in the months before he died. Casolaro described Locker's bumbling attempt to find a killer: by driving into Harlem after midnight and asking a stranger to shoot him in the head. The man demanded cash up front. After Locker complied, the would-be killer left to get a gun but never returned.

"Mr. Locker was forced to continue his search for a killer," Casolaro said. Eventually, he encountered Minor, then 36 and with a history of drug and robbery convictions, outside a Harlem housing project. Minor agreed to the plan, but according to the prosecutor, instead of fetching a gun to kill Locker, he brought a knife and the telephone wire to the desperate man waiting in his car. Then, Casolaro said, Minor plunged the knife into Locker's chest seven times.

Minor was arrested after using Locker's ATM card to retrieve cash — something he says was payment for killing Locker.

"Jeffrey Locker was a foolish, dishonest and pathetic man, but Kenneth Minor was a vicious and callous one," Casolaro said.

Minor says he simply held the knife as Locker lunged at it, and that Locker even demanded he move the weapon slightly after the first few jabs to ensure it penetrated his heart.

"When people are intent on ending their lives, they can do things you would find hard to believe," said Gotlin, whose witnesses are expected to include a forensics expert who will bolster Minor's claim that he moved the knife at Locker's direction.

Steven D. Penrod, a psychology professor at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has studied jury behavior, said he could not think of a comparable case. An interesting wrinkle will be how jurors view Locker's reason for wanting to die, Penrod said. Will they relate to his despondency over financial troubles, or view it as a case of insurance fraud?

"Until you hear everything," he said, "nobody is really in a position to say this defense is ridiculous or plausible."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-suicide-trial-20110221,0,5753488,print.story

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Gregory Rodriguez: Fundamental moral errors

Fanaticism led Shawna Forde, the Arizona anti-immigrant vigilante convicted of murder, to bypass morality.

by Gregory Rodriguez

February 21, 2011

Political fanaticism fosters moral relativism. That's the lesson we should all learn from the gruesome case of Shawna Forde, the Arizona anti-immigrant vigilante who was convicted last week of two counts of first-degree murder.

Prosecutors argued that Forde and two accomplices killed 29-year-old Raul Junior Flores and his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia, in a botched robbery attempt meant to raise money to fund a splinter group of the anti-immigrant Minuteman movement.

Posing as border patrol and law enforcement officers, Forde and friends showed up at Flores' home after midnight and invaded it with tragic consequences. Prosecuters pointed to testimony that Forde had bragged about her plans to steal the money to finance her vigilantism just weeks before the assault. Evidently, Forde's political fixation overrode any belief in the injunction that "thou shalt not kill."

It'd be easy to dismiss the Forde case as a crazy one-off incident. And let's hope it isn't repeated. But her willingness to discard the most basic of moral standards for the sake of a political obsession is something we're all to familiar with in the 21st century.

The South Dakota Legislature's House Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would have expanded the definition of justifiable homicide to include killing someone in the defense of an unborn child. The bill was shelved last week by cooler heads who feared it could provide legal cover for the killing of abortion providers.

During George W. Bush's administration, the issue of the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" had the U.S. government employing one well-establishd evil in an attempt to combat another. The primacy of the battle against terrorism allowed government lawyers to parse words and find loopholes in long-held legal standards protecting prisoners of war.

Of course, conservatives are not the only ones capable of ignoring one set of morals in the single-minded pursuit of another. I know scores of lefty believers in freedom who have condoned dictators — think Fidel Castro or, for an earlier generation, Josef Stalin — because they believe their ideological ends justify their repressive means.

Dostoevsky had this nailed in "Crime and Punishment": His protagonist, Raskolnikov, justified the murder of his landlady, reasoning that his life was worth more than hers — that his grand mission to serve "humanity and the good of all" justified a heinous act.

What may be most interesting about all these Raskolnikovs is the way they betray their beliefs — in lawfulness, in the sanctity of life, in liberty — at the same time they think they are pursuing them.

The great irony is that many observers believe that the global rise in political and religious fanaticism is a reaction against the freedom, choices and moral relativism of modernity.

"Under modern conditions," sociologist Peter Berger has noted, "almost everyone lives in communities in which diversity has taken the place of consensus." Some people react poorly to this "certainty scarcity." They adopt fervent convictions — fundmentalism, if you will — as a coping mechanism.

But as the Shawna Forde story suggests, the illusion of absolute certainty can itself breed moral relativism, in which right and wrong are situational and do not apply to all people equally, especially the true believer.

University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has gone so far as to argue that our moral beliefs and our behavior aren't really connected. He suggests that our sense of right and wrong is mostly based on emotional intuition, on how an action makes us feel. If it makes us "feel bad" to kick a dog, we're likely to think it's the wrong thing to do.

Such a disconnect between articulated moral stances and fundamental moral intuition helps explain how the former can ride roughshod over the latter. In Haidt's words, people "reason their way to a judgment by sheer force of logic, overriding their initial intuition."

What seems to happen to a Shawna Forde or an antiabortion legislator in South Dakota or a Castro-at-all-costs sympathizer is that the convictions they brew up in their heads give them permission to ignore the sense of right and wrong that comes from their hearts.

If nothing else, the Forde case suggests that the embrace of absolutes is proving to be at least as morally dangerous as relativism. Utter certainty about one issue is a poor substitute for simply doing the right thing.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rodriguez-forde-20110221,0,6483599,print.column

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From the New York Times

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Supreme Court to Hear Material Witness Case

GRAND TERRACE, Calif. — When the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, gave Congress a progress report in early 2003 on the agency's success in “identifying and dismantling terrorist networks,” his first example was the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. His second was the arrest of Abdullah al-Kidd.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on March 2 in Mr. Kidd's lawsuit against John Ashcroft, who was President George W. Bush's first attorney general. It is this term's only major national security case, and it will give the court an opportunity to weigh in on an issue that has divided Western democracies: when may the government detain citizens it is unable to charge with a crime for fear they may engage in terrorism?

Australia, Britain and Germany, for instance, have laws allowing such preventive detention. After 9/11, Congress enacted a provision of the USA Patriot Act that allowed the detention of people suspected of terrorism — but it applied only to noncitizens and then only for seven days.

Mr. Kidd's suit contends that policies put in place by Mr. Ashcroft twisted the federal material witness law — which allows the government to arrest people with knowledge of others' crimes to make sure they are available to testify — into a preventive detention measure of the sort used abroad to hold and investigate citizens who are themselves suspected of terrorism.

In his testimony to a House subcommittee on March 27, 2003, Mr. Mueller said that Mr. Kidd was “a U.S. native and former University of Idaho football player.” Mr. Mueller added that Mr. Kidd “was arrested by the F.B.I. at Dulles International Airport en route to Saudi Arabia.” But he failed to say that Mr. Kidd was not arrested on criminal charges but as a material witness.

By the time Mr. Mueller testified, Mr. Kidd had been in custody for 11 days in three states under harsh conditions.

“They were scrambling to make a case against me,” Mr. Kidd said last week in an interview at his father's home here.

In the end, Mr. Kidd was neither charged with a crime nor asked to testify against anyone else. He was released a few days after Mr. Mueller's remarks.

Mr. Ashcroft, represented by the Justice Department under President Obama, says the government complied with the requirements of the material witness law in Mr. Kidd's case, obtaining an arrest warrant from a federal judge. That should, Mr. Ashcroft argues, be the end of the matter even if prosecutors had ulterior motives in detaining Mr. Kidd.

Mr. Kidd is 38 now, with a bald head, bushy beard and an outgoing manner. The memories of his two weeks in custody in Virginia, Oklahoma and Idaho remain vivid, he said. He slept on the floor, his head next to a toilet. He was shackled, strip-searched and made to sit naked and shivering in a holding area while male and female guards looked on. He was taunted and called a terrorist by other prisoners.

“I'm a material witness, but these guys are convicts, federal inmates, and they're being treated better than me,” Mr. Kidd said. “There was only one other guy who had similar treatment as me. That was in Ada County,” in Idaho. “He was in the Aryan Nation. He was on death row.”

As Mr. Kidd talked, his father, Cecil Kidd, a retired corrections officer, spoke up occasionally, angry and incredulous that his son was treated worse than convicted criminals like the kind he used to supervise.

“I would think he would be treated with kid gloves, as a citizen who somehow is incarcerated,” Cecil Kidd said.

Abdullah al-Kidd has settled lawsuits against his jailers based on the conditions of his confinement, but one of his lawyers, Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that that was not enough.

“It is clear that the material witness statute was used as a tool for preventive detention and investigation, resulting in abuse and significant human hardship,” he said. “The question now is whether lower-level officials will be forced to take all of the blame for following a policy adopted at the highest levels of the Justice Department.”

The government says Mr. Ashcroft is entitled to the absolute immunity from lawsuits that officials receive when they are carrying out prosecutorial duties. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, rejected that argument, ruling that the immediate purpose of Mr. Kidd's arrest was not prosecution but detention and investigation.

The government also argues that Mr. Ashcroft is entitled to a qualified immunity that can be overcome only with proof that he violated a clearly established constitutional right. The Ninth Circuit rejected that argument, too.

“Some confidently assert that the government has the power to arrest and detain or restrict American citizens for months on end, in sometimes primitive conditions, not because there is evidence that they have committed a crime but merely because the government wishes to investigate them for possible wrongdoing,” Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. wrote in 2009 for a divided three-judge panel.

“We find this to be repugnant to the Constitution,” Judge Smith wrote, “and a painful reminder of some of the most ignominious chapters of our national history.”

In the government's Supreme Court brief in Mr. Kidd's case, the acting solicitor general, Neal K. Katyal, wrote that the effect of that ruling was to hold the material witness law unconstitutional in many settings and to open “every material witness warrant sought by a prosecutor to challenges based on claims that the prosecutor has an investigatory or security motive.”

The case has attracted an array of supporting briefs. Five former attorneys general have warned that prosecutors will be left with only three options if they cannot rely on the material witness law to detain people suspected of terrorism: “unconditional release,” charging suspects with a crime or designating them as “enemy combatants” with very limited rights.

Some 30 former federal prosecutors filed a brief supporting Mr. Kidd, saying “the only legitimate use of the material witness statute is to secure the presence of a material witness to testify in a criminal proceeding.”

There are also dueling briefs from legal historians. Wesley M. Oliver, a law professor at Widener University, told the justices that detaining suspects as material witnesses was commonplace in American history. Five other scholars wrote that the current practice was “deeply at odds with the principles and purposes underlying material witness laws that applied for hundreds of years.”

At his father's dining room table, Mr. Kidd said he deeply opposed terrorism. “Those people misrepresent my faith,” he said.

He converted to Islam in college, changing his name from Lavoni T. Kidd. As his faith deepened, he gave up his work as a music promoter — hip-hop, fusion rap — and helped at an Islamic charity in Idaho with a man named Sami Omar al-Hussayen.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Kidd was interviewed repeatedly by the F.B.I. He said he was cooperative, never missing an appointment, and was never told that he should not travel or that his testimony might be required in a case the government was building against Mr. Hussayen.

Six months after his last encounter with the F.B.I., on his way to Saudi Arabia to pursue a doctorate in religious studies on a scholarship, Mr. Kidd was arrested at Dulles Airport based on a government affidavit saying he was “crucial to the prosecution” of Mr. Hussayen.

More than a year later, in 2004, an Idaho jury acquitted Mr. Hussayen of charges that he used his computer skills to support terrorism. The jury deadlocked on more minor counts. Mr. Hussayen agreed to be deported to avoid a retrial.

Mr. Kidd said no one from the government bothered to tell him that the Hussayen prosecution was over.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/us/politics/21witness.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Can You Frisk a Hard Drive?

If you stand with the Customs and Border Protection officers who staff the passport booths at Dulles airport near the nation's capital, their task seems daunting. As a huge crowd of weary travelers shuffle along in serpentine lines, inspectors make quick decisions by asking a few questions (often across language barriers) and watching computer displays that don't go much beyond name, date of birth and codes for a previous customs problem or an outstanding arrest warrant.

The officers are supposed to pick out the possible smugglers, terrorists or child pornographers and send them to secondary screening.

The chosen few — 6.1 million of the 293 million who entered the United States in the year ending Sept. 30, 2010 — get a big letter written on their declaration forms: A for an agriculture check on foodstuffs, B for an immigration issue, and C for a luggage inspection. Into the computer the passport officers type the reasons for the selection, a heads-up to their colleagues in the back room, where more thorough databases are accessible.

And there is where concerns have developed about invasions of privacy, for the most complete records on the travelers may be the ones they are carrying: their laptop computers full of professional and personal e-mail messages, photographs, diaries, legal documents, tax returns, browsing histories and other windows into their lives far beyond anything that could be, or would be, stuffed into a suitcase for a trip abroad. Those revealing digital portraits can be immensely useful to inspectors, who now hunt for criminal activity and security threats by searching and copying people's hard drives, cellphones and other electronic devices, which are sometimes held for weeks of analysis.

Digital inspections raise constitutional questions about how robust the Fourth Amendment's guarantee “against unreasonable searches and seizures” should be on the border, especially in a time of terrorism. A total of 6,671 travelers, 2,995 of them American citizens, had electronic gear searched from Oct. 1, 2008, through June 2, 2010, just a tiny percentage of arrivals.

“But the government's obligation is to obey the Constitution all the time,” said Catherine Crump, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Moreover, controversial government programs often start small and then grow,” after which “the government argues that it is merely carrying out the same policies it has been carrying out for years.”

One of the regular targets is Pascal Abidor, a Brooklyn-born student getting his Ph.D. in Islamic studies, who reported being frisked, handcuffed, taken off a train from Montreal and locked for several hours in a cell last May, apparently because his computer contained research material in Arabic and news photographs of Hezbollah and Hamas rallies. He said he was questioned about his political and religious views, and his laptop was held for 11 days.

Another is James Yee, a former Muslim chaplain at the Guantánamo Bay prison, who gets what he wryly calls a “V.I.P. escort” whenever he flies into the United States. In 2003, Mr. Yee was jailed and then exonerated by the Army after he had conveyed prisoners' complaints about abuse, urged respect for their religious practices and reported obscene anti-Muslim caricatures being e-mailed among security staff.

Years later, he evidently remains on a “lookout” list. A federal agent stands at the door of Mr. Yee's incoming plane, then escorts him to the front of the passport line and to secondary screening.

Arriving in Los Angeles last May from speaking engagements in Malaysia, he was thoroughly questioned and searched, he said, and his laptop was taken for three or four hours. He was not told why, but after it was returned and he was waiting to rebook a connecting flight he'd missed, a customs officer rushed up to the counter. “We left our disk inside your computer,” he quoted her as saying. “I said, ‘It's mine now.' She said no, and sure enough when I took the computer out, there was a disk.”

Customs won't comment on specific cases. “The privacy rights that citizens have really supersede the government's ability to go into any depth,” said Kelly Ivahnenko, a spokeswoman.

In general, “we're looking for anyone who might be violating a U.S. law and is posing a threat to the country,” she explained. “We're in the business of risk mitigation.”

Yet the mitigation itself has created a sense of risk among certain travelers, including lawyers who need to protect attorney-client privilege, business people with proprietary information, researchers who promise their subjects anonymity and photojournalists who may pledge to blur a face to conceal an identity. Some are now taking precautions to minimize data on computers they take overseas.

“I just had to do this myself when I traveled internationally,” said Ms. Crump, the lead attorney in a lawsuit challenging the policy on behalf of Mr. Abidor, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the National Press Photographers Association.

During a week in Paris, where she lectured on communications privacy, she had legal work to do for clients, which she could not risk the government seeing as she returned. “It's a pain to get a new computer,” she said, “wipe it completely clean, travel through the border, put the new data on, wipe it completely clean again.”

In simpler days, as customs merely looked for drugs, ivory, undeclared diamonds and other contraband that could be held in an inspector's hand, searches had clear boundaries and unambiguous results.

Either the traveler had banned items, or didn't. Digital information is different. Some is clearly illegal, some only hints at criminal intent, and under existing law, all is vulnerable to the same inspection as hand-carried material on paper.

Most pirated intellectual property and child pornography, for example, cannot be uncovered without fishing around in hard drives. “We've seen a raft of people coming from Southeast Asia with kiddie porn,” said Christopher Downing, a supervisor at Dulles. If a person has been gone only two or three days and pictures of children are spotted in a bag, he explained, the laptop is a logical candidate for inspection. Such searches have been fruitful, judging by the bureau's spreadsheets, which list numerous child pornography cases.

But terrorism is an amalgam of violence and ideas, so its potential is harder to define as officers scrutinize words and images as indicators of attitudes, affiliations and aspirations. Random searches are not done, Mr. Downing said, although courts so far have upheld computer inspections without any suspicion of wrongdoing. In practice, something needs to spark an officer's interest. “If you open up a suitcase and see a picture of somebody holding an RPG,” he noted, referring to a rocket-propelled grenade, “you'd want to look into that a little more.”

The search power is preserved by its judicious use, Mr. Downing said. “If you abuse it, you lose it.” he added. The A.C.L.U. doesn't want customs to lose it, Ms. Crump explained, but just wants the courts to require reasonable suspicion, as the Supreme Court did in 1985 for examinations of a person's “alimentary canal.” The court distinguished such intrusive inspection from “routine searches” on the border, which “are not subject to any requirement of reasonable suspicion, probable cause, or warrant.” The justices added in a footnote that they were not deciding “what level of suspicion, if any, is required for nonroutine border searches” of other kinds.

Laptop searches should be considered “nonroutine,” Ms. Crump argues, something the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit declined to do in 2008, when it reversed a judge's decision to suppress evidence of child pornography obtained during a suspicionless airport computer search.

With the search powers intact, Mr. Abidor no longer dares take the train home from his studies at McGill University in Montreal. He doesn't want to be stranded at the border, waiting hours for a bus, as he was in May. So last month his father drove up from New York to get him for vacation. The men were ordered to a room and told to keep their hands on a table while customs officers spent 45 minutes searching the car, and possibly the laptop, Mr. Abidor said. “I was told to expect this every time.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/weekinreview/20laptop.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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Self-Harm Videos on YouTube: Dangerous or Therapeutic?

A New Study Documents the Rise in Self-Harm Videos on YouTube

YouTube provides easy access to videos of almost anything, but what is the impact on viewers, especially younger viewers, when "anything" includes hundreds of photos, video clips and montages of self-harming behaviors such as cutting and self-mutilation?

In a study that analyzed the videos, Canadian researchers found that the 100 most popular videos portraying self-harm on YouTube have been viewed more than 2 million times and selected as "favorite" more than 12,000 times, triggering concern over what kind of impact the sharing and viewing of these videos may be having on those at risk for self-injurious behavior.

"We found that very few videos actually encourage self-injury," says the lead author on the study, Stephen Lewis of the University of Guelph in Ontario. "Most were neutral or hopeful for overcoming this issue. But these findings also speak to the possibility of a few risks.

"Some videos may work to reinforce self-injury behavior or serve as a trigger for self-harm," Lewis adds. "It might foster communities where self-injury is more normal and [so is to] not always urge people to seek help."

In fact, concerned for the potential risks, YouTube contacted researchers and has since removed the videos they considered inappropriate content, Lewis says.

Self-injury behavior, which, in the videos, most often took the form of self-cutting, is known as non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) because while it involves the deliberate destruction of one's own body tissue, it is not necessarily driven by a desire for suicide. Often, self-harmers report that cutting is a form of coping with emotional pain and that the act of inflicting pain on themselves provides powerful momentary relief from mental distress, says Kim Gratz, director of personality disorders research at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Though it's hard to gauge the prevalence of this behavior, Gratz says that studies find that between 17 and 40 percent of college students admit to committing self harm and between 15 and 30 percent of high school students do.

While research on self-harm and the influence of the Internet is fairly new, some are questioning whether the proliferation of self-harm videos, websites, and message boards -- even those which are somewhat neutral in their portrayal of self harm -- may be as dangerous as the many pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia internet forums that have been condemned by psychiatrists in recent years.

"It's hard to tell what role these videos and websites might play. Depending on the nature of the video it could be incredibly helpful ... [by] providing support and directing people to help, or they might glorify the practice and overlook the downsides. Honestly, I think that's the problem with the Internet [with things like this] -- it can be both."

Self Harm Vids as Social Support?

Monday's research looked at highly viewed videos that either were character-based, meaning they featured a real person speaking, or non-character, which usually featured montages of photos and text set to music.

It found that, at the time of the study in December 2009, 90 percent of videos concerning self harm featured photographs of self injuries and 28 percent actually featured people inflicting injuries on themselves.

Less than half of these videos provided any warning concerning the graphic nature of the images or the risk of "triggering" self-harm behavior in those who had a tendency towards it.

But for the majority of the videos, promoting self-harm did not seem to be the intention. Often, the videos supplied educational information such as prevalence statistics or shared stories of beating self-harm behavior after many years struggling with it. Still others featured scars and warned viewers against the dangers of using self harm as a means of coping.

For many, posting or viewing the videos may be a means of battling feelings of isolation in those too afraid to admit their behavior to others

Kevin Caruso, the executive director of Suicide.org says that "based on the countless communications I have had with people who self-injure, the vast majority of information and videos on the Internet helps and comforts self-injurers more than it puts them in danger."

"So many of them feel the Internet is the only place where they can get help," he adds.

While Caruso has spoken with some people who noted that they are easily triggered to self harm by images or talk of cutting, such people usually choose not to watch the videos.

A recent search of self-harm videos on YouTube brought up many in which posters explicitly mentioned that they created the videos in order to reach out so that other self harmers don't feel so alone.

One such video, posted by a user named SoLostInYou, stated in the comments that, "This is to raise awareness and to let others know, they're not alone."

Another, posted by MisunderstoodSoul, talked about the user overcoming cutting: "I've been self harming for over 5 years, but am at the moment on a break from it, and have noticed that ... I DON'T NEED It. Please just give living without self injury a chance ... there are so many things you can do instead. All the best to you my friends, we really can beat this!"

An Eye Toward Awareness

Lewis says that the main purpose of his study is to "get a sense of what exactly is portrayed and contained within these videos."

The study unfortunately cannot speak to why people post the videos or what impact they are having on those who view them, but Caruso and colleagues are doing further research to help elucidate such questions.

"There's been a lot of interest in the last five years concerning the idea of social contagion with these images, but my sense is that we just don't know what impact they are having. We need more research," Gratz says.

For now, the existing research may serve to raise awareness concerning the prevalence of self harm and the fact that many may be suffering in silence.

"All people who self-injure need immediate and professional help, but most do not get it," Caruso says. "They usually hide their cuts or scars below clothing and hide the pain that is causing them to self-injure."

For more information on how to get help for self injury, see http://www.selfinjury.com or http://www.self-injury.net

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/WomensHealth/harm-vids-youtube-dangerous-therapeutic/story?id=12950980&page=1

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Texas To Allow Concealed Weapons on Campus

Texas is poised to give college students and teachers the right to pack heat on campus, reports AP.

More than half of the state's House of Representatives have signed onto the measure, which permits concealed weapons at universities. The senate, which backed a similar bill in 2009, is expected to support the House's legislation.

Sen. Jeff Wentworth of San Antonio said that at the moment, students are "sitting ducks" if someone opens fire in a classroom.

"The only option now is to hide behind their desks or play dead," said a spokesman for Students for Concealed Carry on Campus.

The bill already has the support of Republican Gov. Rick Perry, who occasionally takes his pistol on his morning runs. Utah has already passed a similar law, while Colorado gives universities the option of allowing concealed handguns.

Victims of the Virginia Tech massacre have traveled to Texas to oppose the bill.

Colin Goddard, who survived the 2007 shooting spree by pretending he was dead, said: It was the craziest day of my life with one person walking around with two guns. I can't even imagine what it would have been like with multiple students and multiple guns."

http://slatest.slate.com/id/2285902/

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