“Start of the Semester Post”: Only 6 Weeks late!
This post was supposed to go up at the start of the semester. In my head it was going to be a usual welcome-back entry: new projects, plans for the fall, that kind of optimistic orientation toward a fresh academic year, a nerdy door quote. But, we are now roughly halfway through October, which tells you something about how the semester has gone. Things have been genuinely chaotic, mostly due to self-inflicted decisions. So here we are, a catch-up post with a few different things in it. Bear with me.
The State of the Semester
To start: I am doing way too much this semester. I say some version of this every semester of course, even more so in the Fall, and I certainly have not yet appreciated the lesson. I am teaching too many classes across too many institutions, the graduate program at Roger Williams is deep in the work of placing establishing connections with the clinical sites for practicums and internships, a new cohort has arrived and needs attention, and the more advanced graduate students are working on research and clinical placements that require significant supervision. I genuinely love working with students of course, but it is genuinely an unreasonable amount of work to be doing at the same time.
The saving grace is that we are already in the groove. By mid-semester, the rhythms are established, the classes are running on their own momentum, and I have mostly figured out how to move between the various demands without losing my mind (mostly anyway). The second half of a semester almost always goes faster and feels more manageable than the first. So, I am not panicking. I am just, as always, doing too many things at once and choosing to frame that as a structural problem rather than a personality trait. Maybe I’ll be different next year. Probably not.
Remembering Frank DiCataldo
Some gloomy news as part of the start of the semester, one of my most important clinical mentors and former professors passed away recently. Dr. Frank DiCataldo was a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Roger Williams University and one of the foundational figures of the forensic mental health counseling program there. He earned his PhD in Clinical Psychology from Saint Louis University and completed his postdoctoral fellowship in forensic psychology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He went on to work at Bridgewater State Hospital and was an integral figure in establishing the Bedford Policy Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to providing quality forensic evaluations of juveniles in the Department of Youth Services. He was President of the American Academy of Forensic Psychology, a Board Diplomate in Forensic Psychology, and in 2013 received the Academy's Distinguished Contribution to Forensic Psychology award. By all professional measures, he was a giant in the field.
What I remember most about Frank, though, is not the resume. It is the way he talked about the at-risk youth he had devoted his career to advocating for. His work with adolescents in the juvenile justice system in New England was tireless and, in many individual cases, genuinely transformative. He believed, with a consistency and passion that never seemed performative, that young people who ended up in the system deserved rigorous evaluation, genuine care, and real advocacy, not just processing. That belief animated everything he did: in the courtroom, in the classroom, and in the conversations he had with students about what it actually means to work as a clinician.
When I joined the Roger Williams faculty, I had the extraordinary experience of becoming a colleague to people who had trained me. To work alongside former professors as a peer is one of the more profound things that happens in an academic career, and Frank was among those people. I am sad that the old guard has gotten smaller. I am sad for his family, his students, and everyone he shaped over his career. And I am, honestly, confronted once again with the particular feeling that comes from losing the people who made you: something like the ground shifting slightly under your feet.
Clancy Update, and a Strange New Development
A quick follow-up on the Lindsay Clancy case, which I covered in my last post. The mistrial stands, and the Plymouth District Attorney's office continues to weigh its options on retrial. As I said before, I strongly suspect they will retry the case, because the political optics of not doing so are very difficult to manage.
What has surprised me in the weeks since the mistrial is the apparent shift in the defense's posture. Attorney Kevin Reddington has been publicly signaling a possible move away from the insanity defense and toward challenging the underlying facts of the case. I find this genuinely strange. The defense invested years and substantial resources in the insanity argument, and the facts of what happened were essentially stipulated at trial. Walking away from that framework in a retrial would be a significant and puzzling strategic pivot.
What I notice is that the loudest voices calling for a fact-based challenge to the case have been coming from true crime enthusiasts, podcasters, and online communities that have developed their own elaborate conspiracy theories. If the defense is in any way reading that community as a constituency, that would be a remarkable and frankly troubling development. It would represent exactly the kind of true crime media effect bleeding into actual legal strategy that I have been researching and writing about. I will be returning to this topic in a future post, because it deserves a full treatment. For now, I am watching it closely and taking notes.
Two Death Penalty Cases Worth Your Attention
In the past two weeks, two significant capital punishment stories have landed almost simultaneously, and together they are raising questions I think deserve serious consideration. I have personal views about the death penalty, and I am going to hold them fairly close here in favor of focusing on what each case actually presents, because both are substantively interesting in ways that go beyond the political valence they have already acquired.
The first is the case of Christa Pike. On September 30, 2026, Tennessee attempted to carry out Pike's execution at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville via lethal injection. The execution failed after two doses were administered. Pike survived and was left in critical condition. Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, described it as the worst botched execution in the modern era. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee launched an investigation while also maintaining publicly that the death penalty remains the appropriate sentence for the most heinous crimes in the state. The Eighth Amendment questions raised by a failed execution are significant and have not been fully litigated in the modern era. What obligation does a state have to a condemned person who survives an execution attempt? What constitutes cruel and unusual punishment when the mechanism of execution itself fails? What about the issue with competency to be executed? These are serious questions, and I am planning a dedicated post on them.
The second case involves Nidal Hasan, the former Army major and psychiatrist convicted of the November 5, 2009, mass shooting at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, Texas. Hasan killed thirteen people and wounded more than thirty before being shot by DACP police and arrested. He was convicted by a military jury in 2013 on thirteen counts of premeditated murder and sentenced to death. President Trump approved his execution by firing squad in early October, and the acting Army Secretary has since announced the execution is scheduled for December 3, 2026, at Fort Hood itself. This would be the first military execution in the United States since 1961.
I’ve always been interested in this case. Hasan's attack at Fort Hood was one of the first active shooter events I studied seriously when I began my research on mass violence, and he has appeared in my coursework and scholarship multiple times since. His identity as a psychiatrist who became a mass murderer is one of the more disturbing facts in the literature on targeted violence; something that remains troubling to me.
Both cases also reflect something more broadly true about this political moment: the current administration has been openly enthusiastic about capital punishment in ways that represent a significant departure from the quieter approach of previous administrations, and that trend deserves sustained attention regardless of where one stands on the underlying policy (Radelet & Lacock, 2009; Gross et al., 2014).
Writing Update: 48,000 Words and a Really Cool Update
Now for unambiguously good news, and I am genuinely excited to share it.
I’m now at approximately 48,000 words! It’s hard to say where that really, is; potentially a little under half-way done. But it’s hard to pinpoint. Over the summer I was working on a chapter and ended up splitting it, which means I am now starting on the second half of what was originally a single chapter. Whether that counts as forward progress or just more words on more pages is a philosophical question I don’t really want to reflect on. But it does feel like the project is cohering; feeling less like a collection of pieces and more like an actual book, and I have learned to take that shift in feeling seriously as a signal that the work is heading somewhere.
The much bigger news is that this summer I connected with a literary agent! Lindsay Guzzardo of the Keystone Literary Agency has agreed to represent me and the book. Keystone is a new agency, founded in 2025 by Guzzardo, who brings considerable editorial experience from previous positions. She represents adult fiction and nonfiction, with a particular strength in narrative nonfiction, which made her an excellent fit for what I am working on.
Having an agent is new territory for me, and I am very excited to be here. But it is just the beginning of a process: refining the manuscript and proposal, then pitching the book to publishers. There is significant work between here and a book on a shelf, and I am realistic about that. But it is a meaningful threshold to cross, and I am genuinely grateful to Lindsay for taking an interest in this project. I am hopeful about what we will produce together, and I look forward to sharing more as things develop.
For those of you who have been following this project since the beginning: thank you. Your readership, and the occasional email asking when the book is coming out, is extremely motivating, likely more than you probably realize.
Closing Thoughts
This post ended up longer and heavier than I anticipated, which is probably appropriate for a midpoint check-in on a semester that has already included a lot. The loss of Frank DiCataldo is a real loss for forensic psychology in New England, for Roger Williams, and for the hundreds of clinicians he trained and mentored across his career. I will try to do the work the way he modeled it: carefully, with genuine investment in the people involved, and with the understanding that the individuals who end up in the forensic system deserve the same quality of attention and advocacy as anyone else.
Keep an eye out for upcoming posts. The death penalty cases are on the list. The Clancy developments and the true crime media question are on the list. And somewhere in there I will try to get back to writing about content rather than just reporting on my own life, which I suspect is what most of you came here for.
References
Bartlett, K. (2026, October 2). Failed 'torturous' execution attempt on Christa Pike reignites death penalty debate. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2026/10/02/nx-s1-5988832/christa-pike-reignites-death-penalty-debate
Death Penalty Information Center. (2026). Botched executions. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/botched-executions
DiCataldo, F. (2009). The Perversion of Youth: Controversies in the Assessment and Treatment of Juvenile Sex Offenders. NYU Press.
Gross, S. R., O'Brien, B., Hu, C., & Kennedy, E. H. (2014). Rate of false conviction of criminal defendants who are sentenced to death. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(20), 7230-7235. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1306417111
Radelet, M. L., & Lacock, T. L. (2009). Do executions lower homicide rates? The views of leading criminologists. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 99(2), 489-508.
Telle, A. R. (2026, October 7). Execution order for Nidal Malik Hasan [Official memorandum]. U.S. Department of the Army.
