Crimeversation

Andrew Warren was sworn in as State Attorney of Florida’s 13th Judicial Circuit, Hillsborough County, on January 3, 2017, after being elected in November of 2016. Mr. Warren leads an office of approximately 130 prosecutors and nearly 300 employees whose mission is to protect the residents of Hillsborough County as well as ensure the fair and impartial application of the law in our criminal justice system.

Mr. Warren previously served as a federal prosecutor with the United States Department of Justice in Tampa, FL, and Washington, DC. After prosecuting street crime as a Special Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia in 2008, Mr. Warren spent the majority of his career at the Justice Department prosecuting complex white collar crime, including investment fraud, Medicare fraud, and corporate corruption. Among other high-profile cases, he successfully prosecuted Robert Allen Stanford and other executives at Stanford Financial Group for orchestrating one of the largest frauds in history, a $7 billion Ponzi scheme.

Wilson R. Palacios, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and Master's Program Director at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Dr. Palacios' research interest include substance use & abuse, hidden populations, and qualitative research methods. In this episode we discuss the opioid epidemic, or as Dr. Palacios prefers, the opioid syndemic.

Kicking off season two is Dr. Khary Rigg from the University of South Florida Department of Mental Health Law & Policy. 

Khary Rigg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mental Health Law & Policy and a Faculty Affiliate of the Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute at University of South Florida (USF). Dr. Rigg also holds a courtesy appointment within USF’s Sociology Department. Dr. Rigg received his Ph.D. from the University of Miami and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in health services research from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Philadelphia VA Medical Center. Dr. Rigg is a health services and policy researcher with over 15 years of experience studying substance use disorders. Prior to coming to USF in 2013, he worked as a Senior Research Associate at the University of Delaware’s Center for Drug & Alcohol Studies and Nova Southeastern University’s Center for Applied Research on Substance Use and Health Disparities. The overall goal of his research is to generate findings that improve the way drug prevention, treatment, and harm reduction interventions are developed and delivered. Dr. Rigg’s research sits at the intersection of addiction, public health, and medicine, and focuses on three main areas: 1) opioid misuse/mortality,  2) drug use within club/nightlife settings, and 3) community-based behavioral health interventions/research. He has conducted studies on underserved populations including drug treatment clients, active street-based users, methadone patients, military veterans, adolescents, and racial/ethnic minorities. Dr. Rigg uses community-based participatory research approaches, qualitative and mixed-methods designs, as well as secondary analysis of large CDC and SAMHSA datasets. 

Episode 9 features policing expert Dr. Lorie Fridell, a professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of South Florida. Dr. Fridell has over 20 years of experience conducting research on law enforcement. Her primary research areas are police use of force and violence against police. Dr. Fridell is a national expert on racial profiling, or what she calls "racially biased policing." She speaks nationally on this topic and provides consultation and command-level training to law enforcement agencies.

She has authored, co-authored or edited books entitled: Police Use of Force: Official Reports, Citizen Complaints and Legal Consequences; Police Vehicles and Firearms: Instruments of Deadly Force; Chief Concerns: Exploring the Challenges of Police Use of Force; Community Policing: Past, Present and Future. Recent articles and chapters on these and other research topics include "Use-of-Force Policy, Policy Enforcement and Training," "The Impact of Agency Context, Policies and Practices on Violence against Police," "Deadly Force Policy and Practice: The Forces of Change," and "Attracting Females and Racial/Ethnic Minorities to Law Enforcement."

Dr. Fridell is a national expert on racial profiling, or what she calls "racially biased policing." 

Publications on this topic include two books: Racially Biased Policing: A Principled Response and By the Numbers: A Guide for Analyzing Race Data from Vehicle Stops (and the companion guide, Understanding Race Data from Vehicle Stops: A Stakeholder's Guide). A recent chapter is and "Racially Biased Policing: The Law Enforcement Response to the Implicit Black-Crime Association."

Dr. Fridell is a Co-PI on the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) funded National Police Research Platform, which is a multi-component, multi-method pilot project collecting data on law enforcement personnel and agencies at 100 sites around the United States.

Dr. Fridell has served as Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on projects funded at close to $8 million; she has brought in close to $1.5 million in grants/contracts to USF. She taught previously at the University of Nebraska and Florida State University. She has received five university-level teaching awards.

Episode 8 features expert George W. Burruss, Ph.D. from the University of South Florida. Dr. Burruss is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and affiliated with the Florida Cybersecurity Center. He received his Ph.D. in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Missouri — St. Louis in 2001. Before earning his doctorate, Dr. Burruss served as a fraud investigator with the Office of Missouri Attorney General. His research focuses on criminal justice organizations, including policing, homeland security, and juvenile courts. Also, he studies the causes and correlates of offending in cyberspace and how the police respond to cybercrime. He recently published a book with colleagues, Policing Cybercrime and Cyberterror.

We are proud to introduce doctoral candidate Caitlyn Muniz from the University of South Florida Department of Criminology. In addition to discussing Caitlyn's research interest, she shares with us her experience as both a graduate student and a mother.

Caitlyn began the USF Criminology PhD. program in the Fall of 2014 after completing a M.A. in Legal Studies from Texas State University and a B.A. in Criminology and Investigations from West Virginia University. 

Following our second death penalty case, our expert today is Kerry Myers from the University of South Florida. Myers played a pivotal role in the Timothy McVeigh case and testified against him at trial. 

Kerry Myers teaches graduate classes on forensic accounting, which includes the topics of white collar crime, fraud, money laundering, and financial investigation, at USF's Lynn Pippenger School of Accountancy in the Muma College of Business. He is also part of the Florida Center for Cybersecurity.

Prior to joining USF, Myers worked 25 years as both an attorney and an accountant with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was one of the original members of the Tampa Bay Bank Fraud Task Force and also served on the Tampa Joint Terrorism Task Force. He was also certified as a bomb technician with the FBI and worked the Oklahoma City Bombing, Centennial Park Bombing in Atlanta, and the TWA Flight 800 crash off of Long Island Sound. He testified against both Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols during their respective trials. His FBI terrorism financing and bombing investigations have taken him to Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Thailand, and Greece. Myers received the Federal Law Enforcement Officers' Association Annual Award for Bravery in 2008 for his work in Afghanistan with improvised explosive devices, and a Director's Award from then-FBI Director Louis Freeh for leading a national terrorism undercover operation.

Myers earned his Juris Doctorate, with distinction, from the University of Missouri and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration-Accounting, summa cum laude, from Central Missouri State University. He is a Certified Fraud Examiner and is licensed to practice law in Missouri, where he was a trial attorney and prosecutor for almost a decade before joining the FBI.

Tune in to PBS on November 20th to see his interview with PBS!

Our second death penalty case in the Month of Murder: domestic terrorist, Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh perpetrated the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and was executed by lethal injection in 2001. Tune in next week for our interview with an FBI agent who was involved in the investigation and trial. 

Our first death penalty expert, Dr. John Cochran, helps us bust 5 death penalty myths! John Cochran is Professor of Criminology at the University of South Florida. He received his B.A. (1980), M. A. (1982), and Ph.D. (1987) in Sociology from the University of Florida. Before his appointment at USF in 1994, he was a faculty member in the Department of Sociology & Social Work at Wichita State University (1986-1989) and the Department of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma (1989-1993). His teaching and research interests include micro-social theories of criminal behavior, macro-social theories of crime and crime control, assessments of issues regarding the legitimacy of capital punishment, and quantitative data collection and analysis. He has published approximately 150 articles, book chapters, and reports, is an ad hoc reviewer for 46 professional journals, and has served on the editorial boards of Justice Quarterly, Deviant Behavior, Journal of Drug Issues, Criminal Justice Policy Review, Sociological Inquiry, Journal of Crime and Justice, and several others.

Kicking off our month of murder is the first death penalty case: Joseph killed his father-in-law on a hog farm in 1990 during a domestic violence dispute.