Death

Life After Death on the Internet

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 17:00:00 +0000

Life After Death on the Internet Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/01/2018 - 10:00

Lisa Marshall

As our lives go digital, Jed Brubaker is studying what happens to all that data after we die.

If Jed Brubaker were to die tomorrow, his husband, Steven, would become the steward of his Facebook page.

His profile picture would remain as it is today, a neat headshot of the 36-year-old assistant professor sporting a goatee, pale blue glasses and a slightly mischievous smile. His cover image might be switched to the lake in Utah where he’d like to have his ashes spread. Above that picture would be a single word, “Remembering,” carefully chosen to alert visitors that he was gone but, in this sacred online space, not forgotten.

Brubaker has painstakingly thought through this scenario, not because he is obsessed with death or Facebook, but because it’s his job to think about it.

As one of the few scholars in the nation to study what happens to our data — including our social media presence — after we die, he’s been instrumental in developing Facebook’s Legacy Contact, the feature that enables users to determine the postmortem fate of their profile. Now, as a founding faculty member in ��񱦵�’s new information science department, he’s working to further improve the ways people experience death online, via new algorithms, apps and features designed to sensitively acknowledge a fact tech companies have tended to ignore: People die.

“In social computing, companies think about designing for all kinds of different aspects of our lives — wedding anniversaries, birthdays, you name it,” said Brubaker. “But they have overlooked perhaps the most profound one of all, which is when those lives come to an end.”

That’s where he comes in.

“I’m that guy,” he said. “I’m the death guy.”

Pathways

Brubaker’s circuitous career path wound through the arts, psychology and tech before leading to a nascent field that manages to incorporate all of the above.

Growing up in Utah, where he was an avid dancer, he dreamed of a career in theater. But his empathetic nature drew him toward psychology. He earned that degree at University of Utah while doing web design on the side, a gig that detoured him into the tech startup world for five years.

Once that life ceased to fulfill him, he pursued a master’s in communication, culture and technology at Georgetown University. When his adviser suggested he get a PhD in information science, he shot him a blank look: “I said, ‘What is information science?’”

The field, which explores the messy intersection of social science and computer science, seemed a perfect fit.

“I tend to gravitate toward the stuff that doesn’t make sense yet, where the fundamental research question is WTF?” he said.

In 2009, while working toward his PhD at the University of California Irvine, he was scrolling through the Facebook page of an acquaintance when he sensed something odd.

Posts on her “wall,” or digital message board, seemed to come mostly on birthdays and carried a somber tone. A few more minutes of scrolling confirmed his sinking feeling.

She was dead, but Facebook had continued to send out birthday reminders and advance her age in her profile. Online, she was 23. In the flesh, she never made it to 20.

“It was eerie,” he recalls.

Jed Brubaker

Not long after that, Facebook launched a well-meaning algorithm called “Reconnect” which sent a message to users encouraging them to “share the latest news” with Facebook friends who hadn’t logged on for a while. The launch, shortly before Halloween, was a PR disaster, as many users got messages nudging them to post on the walls of people who hadn’t logged on for good reason. They’d died.

“It was a technical screw up with very deep social consequences, but how could Facebook have done any differently?” Brubaker recalls. “If people are dead, they can’t remove their own accounts, and if Facebook doesn’t know they are dead, how can they exclude them from these algorithms? It was a bigger problem than anyone realized at the time.”

As Brubaker watched heartbroken family members express their frustration on social media — one woman was asked to contact a friend who had recently been murdered; another was encouraged to post on the wall of her deceased son — he arrived at his next research project.

He would spend the next five years interviewing hundreds of social media users about their encounters with postmortem accounts.

“He saw this issue emerging and took it upon himself to completely redefine a new research area,” said Gillian Hayes, a professor of informatics at UC Irvine and Brubaker’s adviser at the time.

Digital Tombstone

Almost overwhelmingly, people he interviewed about their interaction with the pages of dead loved ones said they liked having a sort of “digital tombstone” where they could post messages, share stories and grieve.

But privacy settings often had sad unintended consequences.

At the time, Facebook managed member deaths — if it learned of them at all — by “memorializing” or freezing their account. The profile still existed for people to post on, but no one had access to control it or manage it.

In some cases, adolescent users died suddenly, leaving behind a profile photo their parents found objectionable (a party pic, a snarky cartoon). When loved ones asked to have the photo changed, Facebook — lacking any idea what the deceased person would have wanted — would decline. In one case, a grieving father who was not friends with his son on Facebook asked if he could be added as a friend so he could participate in the remembrances. He couldn’t be.

I’m that guy— The death guy”

Once the company got wind of Brubaker’s research, it enlisted his help, not only to provide insight into the problem, but to help solve it.

In February 2015, when Brubaker was still a student, Facebook launched Legacy Contact, allowing users to designate a steward of their account who could write a final post, change or update profile or cover photos, add friends and even download photos to share with loved ones not on Facebook.

The carefully chosen word “Remembering” would gently indicate the person had passed, while inviting visitors to interact.

“It can often be so hard for young researchers to get the outside world to care about their research,” said Hayes. “To have Facebook launch this product based on his research while he was still writing his dissertation was just amazing.”

A Kinder, Gentler Wake

Brubaker continues to work with Facebook to study and refine Legacy Contact, and his research has inspired other social media companies to explore how they deal with user deaths.

At his Identity Lab on the CU campus, Brubaker also has begun exploring other challenges related to online discourse about life, identity and death.

Because social media enables us to rediscover acquaintances we haven’t spoken with for decades, for instance, we are now subjected to more individual deaths than any generation that has come before us. That raises sticky questions.

“How are you supposed to grieve the death of someone you would have otherwise forgotten?” he said, noting that when people grieve too openly online, they’re often accused of “rubbernecking” or “grief tourism.”

In one recent study co-authored with Katie Gach, a doctoral student at CU’s ATLAS Institute, the duo analyzed thousands of online comments responding to the deaths of Prince, David Bowie and actor Alan Rickman. They found that commenters routinely mocked others. Some even dissed the dead.

“These people were fighting in what was essentially an online wake. This would never happen in a normal, prenewsfeed world,” said Brubaker, who believes subtle changes could be made to algorithms so the most toxic online comments (which tend to get the most clicks) don’t necessarily rise to the top.

I hope death is a little bit kinder to people”

He and his students are also mulling outside-the-box ideas that could someday extend the way we interact with the dead via their data.

Want to go to grandma’s favorite restaurant and order her favorite dish on her birthday? Maybe you could tap into her Yelp data to find out what it was.

Missing an old friend? Maybe you could summon a data-driven, holographic representation of her.

Brubaker knows this sounds creepy. But there was a time when photographs or videos of the dead seemed creepy to the living. As technology changes, we change too.

“Whether it will be acceptable or not all depends on how it is designed,” he said.

How would he like to see his own memory live on?

“I just hope that as a result of my work, death is a little bit kinder to people.”

Illustration by Josh Cochran/ Photo courtesy Jed Brubaker

As our lives go digital, Jed Brubaker is studying what happens to all that data after we die.

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The History of the Death Penalty in Colorado

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 20:23:38 +0000

The History of the Death Penalty in Colorado Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/28/2017 - 14:23

The History of the Death Penalty in Colorado (2017, University Press of Colorado) By Michael L. Radelet, professor of sociology

By Michael L. Radelet

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A Pact with the Living

Anonymous — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 22:35:47 +0000

A Pact with the Living Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/13/2017 - 15:35

By Dan Eberhart (Edu'76)
(AuthorHouse, 351 pages; 2016)

Buy the Book

There is a fine line between those who go to war and those who vow to keep them from going. Supporting them on both sides of the divide are the loved ones left behind. A Pact with the Living is about war but is not a war story. It explores how--after all the battles, sacrifices, and loss--survivors on both sides of the divide carry on and come to peace with their grief.

On a cold December night in 1969, all American men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six had their destinies decided by a small piece of paper pulled from a blue capsule, the first selective service lottery. Two men and a woman watching the event will cross paths for the first time. Their journeys through life will clash along the way then unite after going through hell and back.

A Pact with the Living will bring the reader to the Vietnam War Memorial and ask two questions. Are 58,000 names on a wall a just price to pay for a cause? What is the cost to avoid being a name on that wall? In the end, A Pact with the Living will show that the dead on either side of the divide never leave us. They will tell us that the soldier and the pacifist have more in common than not.

There is a fine line between those who go to war and those who vow to keep them from going. Supporting them on both sides of the divide are the loved ones left behind.

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Sleuthing for Jane Doe

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 06:00:00 +0000

Sleuthing for Jane Doe Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/01/2010 - 00:00

Lisa Marshall

Silvia Pettem (A&S’69) is shown at the Columbia Cemetery in Boulder where the original headstone of Jane Doe, is part of a new marker (not shown) provided by Dorothy Gay Howard’s family.

As she pushes open the wrought-iron gate at Boulder’s Columbia Cemetery, Silvia Pettem (A&S’69) looks like she is coming home. She cradles a bundle of yellow daisies in one arm and glances warmly across a sea of weathered tombstones. A cool gust blows back her shoulder-length auburn hair, as if to welcome her.

“I don’t mean to sound too wacko,” she says, speaking bluntly as she often does. “But sometimes I even come and have my lunch here. I feel like I’m among friends.”

In a sense, she is.

In the course of her decades-long career as a local history writer, the colorful 63-year-old has gotten to know many of the inhabitants of this grassy 10-acre burial ground. There’s Mary Rippon, the CU professor who had a secret affair and bore a child with one of her students in the late 1800s; Tom Horn, a hired gunman who was wrongfully hanged for murder in 1903; and Marietta Kingsley, a notorious madam from Boulder’s 19th century red light district.

But while the others fed Pettem’s lifelong curiosity about history, none changed her life like the woman Boulderites knew — until recently — as “Jane Doe.”

“I feel like I know her,” Pettem says, as she kneels to gather a handful of crisp dead rose petals by her tombstone and replaces them with fresh flowers.

A born historian

Fifty-five years after she went missing, Dorothy Gay Howard, left, was identified in 2009 through DNA tests as the woman who was buried in Boulder’s Columbia Cemetery and known as Jane Doe.

From the day in 1996 when Pettem discovered the humble grave marker etched with the words “Jane Doe: April 1954: Age About 20 Years,” she has spent nearly 14 years investigating the crime. She scoured newspaper archives, court and coroner records and genealogy sites in hopes of identifying the mystery woman and bringing her murderer to justice. In the process, she has evolved from a middle-aged mom with zero police training into a lauded cold-case investigator called upon by law enforcement agents nationwide.

In May her work paid off when the victim’s surviving family members joined her at the cemetery to replace the “Jane Doe” headstone with one bearing the woman’s true name — Dorothy Gay Howard.

Now, with the mystery solved and her book Someone’s Daughter: In Search of Justice for Jane Doe (Taylor Trade Publishing) nominated for a Colorado Book Award, the biggest question facing Pettem is: What’s next?

“At the age of 63 I have found my life’s work,” she says.

Pettem was born in 1947 in Lancaster, Pa., the only child of an electrical engineer and a “homemaker who didn’t like housework.” She grew up in the suburbs in an ultramodern home she hated.

“I never felt comfortable there,” she says, tracing her affinity for all things antique back to her early youth.

When she landed in Boulder in 1965 as a CU psychology major, she found herself drawn to the area’s historic buildings, rugged mountain towns and rich pioneer history. Rather than observe them from a distance, she immersed herself, moving into a tiny Fourmile Canyon cabin with no electricity or running water where she cooked on a wood stove, sewed quilts and raised two daughters.

“Living up there in that environment really got me interested in who came before me,” she recalls.

Since then she’s written a dozen local history books, including Separate Lives: The Story of Mary Rippon (Book Lode) and Behind the Badge: 125 Years of the Boulder Police Department (Book Lode), as well as countless history columns for the Boulder Camera.

But on Oct. 5, 1996, her “relatively ordinary” life took an unexpected twist. While playing the part of Mary Rippon during a “Meet the Spirits” event at Columbia Cemetery, Pettem listened intently as an actor playing Jane Doe told Doe’s story:

“Please give me back my name. No one knows who I am or how I came to die — battered, beaten and naked on the rocky edge of Boulder Creek. I was found in April 1954 by two college students out on a hike. My murderer, whoever he was, was brutal and vicious, but the people of Boulder gave me a Christian funeral . . .”

“My first thought was that could be my daughter,” recalls Pettem, whose daughters were 19 and 23 at the time. “I thought to myself, ‘No one should go to the grave without a name.’”

Searching for Jane Doe

In the coming years, Pettem managed to track down the woman’s missing autopsy report and photos and reconstruct much of what happened to her via brittle newspaper clippings, phone interviews and internet research. She enrolled in a 12-week Citizens’ Academy to learn about the inner workings of the criminal justice system and sit in on police officer training classes. And she regularly visited the rocky Boulder Creek shore — just 300 yards downstream from the Boulder Falls parking lot — where Jane Doe’s body was found.

In 2003, with a bulging file in hand, she knocked on the office doors of Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle and then Lieutenant Phil West to ask if they would be willing to exhume Jane Doe’s body and reopen the case.

They obliged, well aware of the daunting task ahead.

“Frankly, for that period of time, our files are non-existent. There is a big blank in documentation through the 1960s,” West says. “It was only through Silvia’s diligence that we were able to reconstruct what became the case file.”

Pettem proceeded to open a donation fund and raised several thousand dollars from interested Boulder citizens and beyond to help pay for the exhumation. She also enlisted the help of Vidocq Society members (forensic specialists who volunteer to help solve cold murder cases) who donated their time and expertise over the years.

On a foggy June morning in 2004, a backhoe scraped away the dirt in Columbia Cemetery to reveal a disintegrated coffin and the exposed remains of Jane Doe. As officers wrapped police tape around the scene, Pettem found herself on the inside of the tape, standing by the open grave looking in. “It was exhilarating,” she admits.

A forensic sculptor used Jane Doe’s remains to craft a 3-D image of what she looked like, and soon it was appearing everywhere from People magazine to America’s Most Wanted. Finally, after several heartbreaking false leads and years of wondering, Pettem got her answer on Oct. 23, 2009.

DNA tests had confirmed that Jane Doe was Dorothy Gay Howard, a strong-willed Phoenix teen who left home in 1953 possibly to visit an aunt who lived in Denver’s Capitol Hill area. She never arrived.

While the case remains open, Pettem and West suspect Howard encountered convicted serial killer Harvey Glatman in Denver. (Ligature marks shown in Doe’s morgue photographs are similar to those left on the three women Glatman was convicted of murdering. He was executed in 1959.)

On May 22, Howard’s surviving sister, Marlene Ashman of Polk County, Ark., traveled to Boulder to bid final farewell to her sister and provide her with a tombstone etched with her name.

“At least people here were kind enough to love her and give her some dignity,” Ashman told reporters.

What’s next?

Standing by that gravestone today, Pettem can’t help but feel a sense of melancholy. Her relationship with Howard’s family has been more distant than she had hoped for.

“From the day I first walked into the sheriff’s office and said ‘I want to return these remains to the family’ I looked forward to the day I would meet them,” she says. “But it hasn’t been a warm relationship. Maybe it’s just too soon.”

And after so many years of dogged pursuit, “it has left a big gap in my life now that it’s solved.”

But that void will likely soon fill.

Already Pettem has been credited with assisting in another Boulder County cold case, helping to locate the killer (now deceased) in the 1970 homicide of an 18-year-old named Harold Nicky Nicholson. She’s also teaching courses to local law enforcement agencies, writing for forensic magazines and juggling invitations from around the country to help in unsolved crimes.

“I may have found my next project,” she says, keeping mum about the details.

And this one, she quips, won’t take 14 years.

As she pushes open the wrought-iron gate at Boulder’s Columbia Cemetery, Silvia Pettem looks like she is coming home.

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Chase Murder Case Closed 12 Years Later

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Chase Murder Case Closed 12 Years Later Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/01/2009 - 00:00

In June a Boulder jury found Diego Olmos Alcalde guilty of first-degree murder, felony murder, first-degree sexual assault and second-degree kidnapping of CU-Boulder senior Susannah Chase on Dec. 21, 1997. He was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.

Chase was walking home from downtown alone when she was beaten across the street from her Spruce Street house, dragged to a car, raped and left in an alley to die. Her murder rocked the community and led to a number of campus safety initiatives symbolized by the logo on the right, including the addition of dozens of emergency phones and expansion of the NightRide/NightWalk organization that pairs students with volunteers to accompany them home after dark.

For years police were unable to link a suspect to Chase’s murder, but DNA recovered from her body was preserved as evidence and finally matched with Alcade’s DNA.

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Walking the Line Between Life and Death

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Walking the Line Between Life and Death Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/01/2009 - 00:00

Lisa Marshall

It’s been 25 years since sociology professor Michael Radelet decided to publicly denounce the death penalty, but he can still recall the children’s cries that made him do it.

It was 1 a.m. on July 13, 1984, six hours before David Washington, a convicted triple-murderer, was to be sent to the electric chair. Radelet, then a young sociology professor with an interest in capital punishment, had gotten to know Washington well through his research. When execution day came, he looked on as the man’s wife and young children said their tearful goodbyes. Then he walked them out of Florida State Prison’s death row.

“His daughters just kept screaming as we left, ‘Please don’t kill my daddy,’ ” Radelet recalls. “I thought, ‘What good is it going to do to kill this guy and leave another family behind to mourn the loss of a loved one?’ ”

A quarter-century later, such unconditional sympathy for victims of tragedy remains a driving — albeit controversial — force in Radelet’s career, leading the 58-year-old to advocate as fiercely for death row inmates and their families as he does for the parents of homicide victims. Since publishing his first paper in the ’80s, he has written dozens on wrongful conviction, racial bias and other issues surrounding capital punishment. He also has conducted pivotal research that has led legislative bodies to reconsider the death penalty, testified at 75 trials and developed relationships with more than 100 death row inmates, including infamous serial killer Ted Bundy.

Radelet also has forged a less-publicized, seemingly unlikely alliance with those who occupy the other side of the courtroom aisle — families of murder victims. Since his arrival at CU-Boulder in 2001, he and his students have gathered reams of data on unsolved homicides in Colorado and worked alongside family members to craft a first-in-the-nation bill that would ban the state’s death penalty and put the money saved toward investigating cold cases.

In March, it failed in the Colorado senate by one vote after passing in the house.

“I have found that families of homicide victims and families of death row inmates have a lot more in common than they have differences,” says Radelet, seated in a cluttered office decorated with personal notes from Bundy and recognition plaques from the Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons. “They have all taught me an incredible amount over the years, and I can pass that knowledge on to my students,” he says.

The bottom of the ladder

Radelet’s gravitation toward society’s underdogs began in his teens when, as a student at a Catholic high school in Lansing, Mich., he traveled to Chicago to do charity work with elderly poor. After earning his doctorate in sociology from Purdue, he landed a teaching job at the University of Florida in 1979, and before long his curiosity brought him to a Students against the Death Penalty meeting.

“I always had an interest in working with people at the bottom of the ladder,” he says.

Sociology professor Michael Radelet conducted a 2003 study with 50 undergraduate students finding, among other things, nearly one-third of those executed in Colorado have been minorities.

Initially, he had no firm opinion about capital punishment. But the more he learned, the more it troubled him.

In 1981, he published a seminal study of 600 Florida homicide cases, concluding that those accused of murdering whites are far more likely to be sentenced to death than those accused of murdering blacks. Since then, his research, along with that of others, suggests ethnic minorities are more likely to be sentenced to death than whites, and that wrongful convictions are higher than previously believed.

Since the 1859 hanging of John Stoefel from a cottonwood tree in Denver in what was then the Kansas Territory, another 102 legally mandated executions have been carried out in Colorado through April 2009, Radelet says. Ninety percent of those were put to death for killing white people, according to a 2003 study conducted by the professor and his students. Nearly one-third of those executed have been minorities, a “disproportionate” number given the state’s small minority population for most of its history.

To date, 238 felony inmates have been exonerated nationwide due to DNA evidence, according to the Innocence Project (17 had been sentenced to death). In all, 133 inmates have been released from death row with either a pardon, charges dismissed or an acquittal. And studies in Florida and Illinois suggest death penalty cases are often riddled with errors.

“The question people have been asking for 30 years is ‘Who deserves to die?’ The more important question is ‘Who deserves to kill?’ ” Radelet says. “We make so many mistakes that the only clear lesson is that we do not deserve to kill.”

Criminals and their families

Much of his research is based on studying and developing working relationships with hundreds of death row inmates and their families. His goals are to learn what their family backgrounds are, details of the criminals’ lives, what living in prison is like and how they view the problem of criminal violence.

For a decade, he and Bundy met regularly in a Florida prison, where Bundy scrawled drawings of his cramped cell and shared hundreds of letters he had gotten from what Radelet calls “death row groupies.”

He offered Radelet a unique insight into the disturbed mind of a serial killer; in return, Radelet offered a connection to the outside world.

“We got along quite well as long as he was in handcuffs,” he quips.

Make no mistake, he stresses. “You don’t oppose the death penalty because these guys are great citizens. You oppose it because of what it does to us as a society.”

Others disagree.

Radelet met a barrage of criticism and death threats after publishing a 1985 study reporting that since 1900, 23 innocent people had been executed. Since then, detractors have accused him of being insensitive to victim’s families.

Others like retired Adams County, Colo., prosecutor Bob Grant, who has prosecuted more than a dozen death penalty cases, feels the death penalty should remain intact. He frequently visits Radelet’s classes to offer his perspective.

“There has never been an execution in this country where the individual was later exonerated,” asserts Grant, noting that “not convicted” and “innocent” mean very different things. He feels many people have been released from death row either for political reasons, lack of evidence or prosecution errors — not because someone proved they did not commit the crime.

Investigating homicides

Howard Morton, whose son was murdered in 1975 at age 18, had just founded Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons when he first heard Radelet speak in 2001. For him, he says, the death penalty was a nonissue at the time.

“I told him, ‘You can’t be for or against the death penalty if you haven’t found the murderer yet.’ You’re talking to the wind.”

In response, Radelet invited Morton to speak to his criminology class, and soon 12 of his students embarked on a project to investigate unsolved homicides. Thanks in part to those student efforts and those of subsequent classes, The Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons group has grown from 11 members to 600 and collected data on 1,445 unsolved Colorado murders. Kelly Fernandez-Kroyer (Soc’04) — one of the original 12 students — took a job with the organization.

A growing body of research shows that a death penalty sentence — complete with its multiple appeals, lengthy trials and fees for expert witnesses — costs taxpayers more than a life sentence without parole.

For instance, a 2008 California study found that the state pays $90,000 per year more to confine an inmate to death row than to a maximum security prison, costing the state an extra $63.3 million annually. Such numbers swayed Morton.

“In the last 40 years there have been 7,000 murders in Colorado, and we have executed one guy and it has cost us millions of dollars a year,” he says. “It is a failed government policy.”

Such comments make Radelet proud.

“When I teach, I really challenge students to become involved in the important issues of our day. I tell them,

‘I don’t care what side you are on. I don’t care if you agree with me. The trick is to pick an issue to get involved in, make a stand and stick with it for the long haul.

I teach commitment.”

Professor Michael Radelet is one of the nation's capital punishment experts.

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