Sex is everywhere in our society, and it’s grabbing the attention of young and old, sometimes in a mutual, covert and criminal embrace.

I’ve been reading about a rash of student-teacher sex arrests lately here in San Diego County, including four teachers – three men and a woman – at a single high school. That piqued my curiosity a bit, but I figured it was probably just a coincidence.

The impetus to blog on this topic was finally spurred by a story that said one such arrest – a 38-year-old junior high school teacher who had had a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student – led to a lockdown at a local high school where the defendant’s wife worked as a teacher. The wife was not on campus that day, but after receiving a threat from her estranged husband, she called the school, where officials immediately called 911. Police officers from two different cities circled the campus and flew overhead in helicopters; parents who'd come to pick up students were turned away, prompting frantic cell phone calls and text messages to their children. All of this turned out to be a false alarm, but it got me thinking.

So, it’s come to this. What the hell is going on here?

Is this a case where more attention is being focused on a problem, which increases awareness and therefore results in more arrests? Or is this trend truly growing because of independent but contributing factors? And if it's the latter, what are the potential causal factors?

San Diego has certainly had its share of crazy crime cases, but I had a feeling that this trend was not geographically unique to my hometown, or even to Southern California. Nonetheless, I did a little Internet research to see if I could identify any demographic patterns.

I found nothing out of the ordinary, but I did read that more teens are having sex with each other at school, in the dark auditorium or some other cubbyhole, between classes. Apparently, it makes them feel rebellious.

I also noticed a couple of other points of interest: Nationally, the media is paying a lot more attention these days to the female teachers who are being arrested for having sex with their teenage male students, and a whole lot of people (including a couple of judges) are discussing whether their 13-, 16-, or 18-year-old male partners are actually "victims" in what was most often described as consensual sexual relations.

Still, the majority of teacher offenders seem to be male, which is not all that surprising because most sexual predators and pedophiles are men.

Now, I've certainly watched my share of "To Catch A Predator" episodes of “Dateline NBC,” fascinated by how many men cannot seem to control their twisted urges to have sex with underage boys and girls as young as 13. It's sad, really, that they need to go online, meet these kids in chat rooms and then drive several hours for a clandestine meeting when the parents are away. Many of these men seem simply, well, lonely. They also seem disconnected, not only from reality, but from the rest of society as well.

Looking for answers, I interviewed criminal psychologist Eric Hickey, the system-wide director of forensic studies at Alliant International University, to get an expert’s take on all of this.

Hickey said he believed teacher-student sex is being reported more because people are paying closer attention to what constitutes sexual activity between teachers and students. Historically, he said, such activity was considered an aberration when it involved a female teacher, if people acknowledged it at all.

Hickey noted that children are also sexualized at a much younger age today, some experimenting with oral sex as early as 10 or 11 years old after hearing from their peers that it’s "kind of a cool thing to do." (I don't know about you, but that little factoid shocked me, although I do recall a recent episode of “The View,” where one of the hosts was complaining about the tiny pairs of low-cut thong underwear that were being manufactured for children wearing tight low-rise jeans, a nauseating image in and of itself.)

Another factor, Hickey said, is that sex is being more openly discussed by society at large, including topics that were pretty much taboo in years past.

For example, he said, more people are talking about paraphilic activity, i.e. aberrant sexual behavior such as pedophilia, sadism and necrophilia. If you have HBO, you can watch documentaries about prostitutes at work. Pornography is also rampant on the Internet, available not only to adults but also to children whose parents are not monitoring their computer activity as closely as they should.

Whether it’s on TV, the movies or the Internet, we’re all more exposed to these topics as barriers and sexual mores have been breaking down and we are constantly focused on aberrant and criminal behavior on highly-rated shows like “CSI” or “Law & Order.”

Hickey points out that when sex is illegal, as it is between an adult and an underage student, it’s a crime and that, for some people, makes it more exciting. I would add that some teens might also see this type of sex as “a cool thing to do,” but unfortunately, they are often unaware of the lasting emotional damage it can cause.

Hickey noted that teachers today have more access to students outside the classroom. Because of the widespread use of text messaging, cell phones, instant messages, emails and chat rooms, he said, teachers are able to communicate with their students in personal and immediate ways they couldn't before. (That’s also how some of their illegal liaisons are exposed.)

“I do believe that pedophiles go into occupations consciously or subconsciously" where they can meet children or teenagers, Hickey said.

But, he added, “the vast majority of school teachers wouldn't even think” of doing this and even if they did, most would not do it again. In general, he said, those who engage in sex with their students clearly don't have the maturity or insight and are willing to cast aside their careers for just a couple minutes of fantasy.

I’ve noticed another trend myself and I’m wondering if it might be related somehow: People seem so overly stimulated these days, so stressed out and overwhelmed. Some seem so lonely and disconnected from other people because so much of our communication these days is done by cell phone or computer.

I read a story recently that acknowledged this trend, saying that people were turning to social networking Web sites to try to feel a greater sense of connection with others. I would point out that this does nothing to provide the touch of another human being.

When I mentioned this to Hickey, he told me I was expressing a similar sentiment to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who said that technology is alienating people from society. I have to wonder if, like the predators on “Dateline,” some of these teachers are feeling a deep-seated loneliness and disconnectedness and may be reaching out – inappropriately, of course – to children and teenagers because they are more accessible to them, so much more vulnerable and approachable than adults.

I'm not sure what can be done to fix this complicated set of problems, but I'd be curious to hear what other people think.

It did little to reassure me when Hickey said, in closing, “There's nothing in the water.”

By Caitlin Rother

By Caitlin Rother

America loves to watch when the rich misbehave, especially when the setting is the idyllic community of La Jolla, a world-renowned vacation and surfing spot where the “Beach Blanket Bingo” beauties went to high school and came home to retire.

Just like the actresses who starred in the Beach movies of the 1960s, I, too, went to La Jolla High School. And so did a group of five young men who have been charged with first-degree murder in the death of another LJHS alum who died last May from a skull fracture he suffered after a night of drinking and fighting with these five defendants.

For the past week or so, I’ve been sitting in the San Diego County courthouse watching the preliminary hearing for these five young men play out in Judge John Einhorn’s courtroom. In addition to the murder charge they all share, the District Attorney’s Office has filed 13 counts of felony assault against one or more of them, 16 counts in all.

The rest of the nation is watching, too. This week, the “Today” show and the New York Times both ran stories on the case and “Dateline” is working one up as well. Yesterday the British media began making calls.

I’ve been following the case with great curiosity since it broke a year ago with the death of Emery Kauanui, a professional surfer who had partied over the years with these five young men who are allegedly part of a larger group of twenty-something men who called themselves the “Bird Rock Bandits.” Bird Rock is a neighborhood at the southern end of La Jolla, where these young men, who range in age from 21 to 23, grew up together.

In my day, the venerable institution from which we all graduated was nicknamed “La Jolla Get High School” because someone had spray-painted the word “Get” over the school sign. So, clearly, partying is nothing new to La Jolla High School students, many of whom are the children of well-educated and affluent professionals. The school is conveniently located only a few blocks from Windansea, a beautiful beach where some of these defendants have been known to hang out. The five co-defendants also played football together back in the day.

More recently, according to the prosecution witnesses who have testified so far, the Bird Rock Bandits liked to drink together – and then start fights with other people.

On the night that Kauanui was dealt the blow that proved fatal four days later, he spilled beer on Eric House at a La Jolla bar, then the two decided to fight later that night at Kauanui’s house. Kauanui called up some friends to back him up because he thought he was going to get jumped, and, as he anticipated, all five defendants showed up together in one car.

Kauanui was kicked and punched by the group as he fought House, but he won the primary fight against House nonetheless. Then, as he was arguing with Seth Cravens, the prosecution claims Cravens sucker-punched Kauanui (Cravens had a reputation for taking such shots), causing the surfer to fall backward on the pavement and crack his skull open. All but House ran or drove away before police arrived.

It’s unclear how the name “Bird Rock Bandits,” aka BRB, came about. Perhaps it was a playful imitation of the monikers the FBI give bank robbers that often run in the newspaper. But as the prosecution contends, this group has morphed into a gang with an increasingly violent pattern of criminal behavior that dates back at least three years before Kauanui’s death.

The other defendants are Matthew Yanke, Orlando Osuna, and Henri “Hank” Hendricks, the latter of whom had been away at college in New Hampshire for much of that time, playing football under the mentorship of retired Chargers and New England Patriots quarterback Doug Flutie, now a close friend. Hendricks was suspended after charges were filed against him.

To back up the gang allegation, prosecutor Sophia Roach has presented exhibits of drawings seized in searches of at least one defendant’s home, showing Nazi swastikas, Hells Angel stickers, a creature with goat-like horns wearing a red scarf over the lower portion of his face like a bandit, and the motto, “It’s a pirate’s life for me.”

This gang allegation is pivotal for this case because under California law, it raises the stakes in the form of an “enhancement.” Essentially, this is an added layer of legal gobbledygook that means more evidence of prior bad acts can be presented in court against these defendants and that additional years will be tacked onto their sentences if they are convicted.

Clearly, this case is creating so much buzz because these defendants are aren’t the typical gang members you’d expect to see in court; the defense attorneys claim that the DA’s office is stretching the gang law to fit this case.

The $64,000 question is whether this gang enhancement will hold up in Judge Einhorn’s courtroom. Without it, the prosecution’s case would appear to be much weaker. Some believe that involuntary manslaughter may be a more appropriate charge than homicide.

“It’s not a murder,” said Cravens’ sharp-tongued attorney, Mary Ellen Attridge, who works for the Alternate Public Defender’s Office.

I’d only planned to come for a day or two, but I’ve found myself returning every day so far, becoming a familiar fixture to the defendants’ family members who also have attended faithfully day after day – watching in disbelief as their young, handsome and athletic brothers, sons, grandsons, or nephews are accused of such horrors.

The prosecution has put on a parade of witnesses who have described actions by one or more of these defendants, as well as by other La Jolla High alums (i.e. Bandits) who have not been charged, at least in this case. Accusations include throwing punches that break facial bones, requiring surgery; intimidating people with violence and threatening to kill them; accosting beachgoers; crashing parties in a chartered bus, beating up guests and even hitting young women who get in their way.

Still, one after another, these young men’s parents have approached me to say they hope that I will write “the truth” about their sons. There seems to be a pervasive sense among these families that this is an overblown prosecutorial attack on what is essentially a bunch of good kids whose bright futures are at stake.

Cravens is the 13th child in a Mormon family of 14. He’s the only one of the five defendants who is still in jail – the others are out on bail – and has more charges against him than any of the others. Attridge, his attorney, has described Kauanui’s death as the result of a “fight gone bad.” She said she doesn’t even know what Hendricks is even doing in court, calling him “Joe College.” His primary role in the fatal fight, it seems, is that he pulled Kauanui’s girlfriend off House, who was on top of Kauanui at the time, then fled the scene with his friends.

“I think he’ll walk out after the prelim,” Attridge said.

Yesterday in court, Attridge admitted to the judge that she was attempting to impeach the case out of existence. She has contended that virtually all the assault charges were only filed after Kauanui died because a number of angry La Jollans complained that they or their children had been attacked by the hooligans they read about in the paper and the police had done nothing.

Attridge created quite a stir when she said Kauanui called a friend before the fatal fight and, quoting from a prosecution witness statement that her office transcribed from a CD, she said, “I’ve got people at my house, I’m going to kill ‘em.”

When she learned from the investigator testifying on the stand that this statement was not reflected on the DA’s transcript of the same witness interview, Attridge raised the question with the judge why it wasn’t. I think it’s safe to assume we were all wondering the same thing.

Roach said she isn’t really allowed to speak about the case outside of court, where she has been trying to persuade the judge that Kauanui’s death occurred as a result of a plan by these young men to gang up on the guy and beat him to a pulp. Ironically, in the cozy courtroom, Roach stands at a table, surrounded by the gang of five defense attorneys and their second chairs, who often times call out “objection” simultaneously as she is questioning witnesses.

For the past week, the prelim has been fraught with conflicting stories from various witnesses who saw or heard the fight at different times and from various vantage points; some are friends or neighbors of the victim, others are friends of the defendants, or both.

Let’s just say there are quite a few variations on what happened the night Kauanui was dealt his fatal blow and no shortage of “I don’t recall” and “I don’t know” statements by the various police detectives and investigators who have taken the stand.

It seems that the judge, whose voice at times has seemed to reflect irritation by how long the proceedings are taking as the number of exhibits reached 99 yesterday, has his work cut out for him.

By Caitlin Rother

They opened the curtain in the former gas chamber at San Quentin state prison and announced that the execution had begun. It took five minutes to kill Tommy Thompson, a man who proclaimed his innocence to the end.

During those grueling five minutes, as I craned my neck to see from the bleachers where I stood with the other reporters, the only sound in the room was the shwooshing of the air-conditioning and the heart-wrenching sobs of a blonde woman Thompson had asked to come witness his death. The brother of the 21-year-old nanny Thompson had been convicted of raping and killing was there, too. He’d been waiting 17 years to get justice for his sister’s death.

It's been 10 years since I witnessed that execution, but I will never forget watching Thompson repeatedly raise his head up to communicate with the blonde woman, straining against the straps that were supposed to be holding him down on the table.

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” he mouthed to her.

"I love you," she replied, blowing him a kiss through the glass walls of the chamber.

"I know," he mouthed back, smiling. "Be brave."

I remember wondering at the time how he was able to move around like that, considering he was hooked up to intravenous lines that were feeding him a fatal three-drug cocktail. (The people injecting the drugs were on the other side of a wall, hidden from view.)

I had forgotten his last words to the warden until I pulled out my old story this week: “For 17 years, the attorney general has been pursuing the wrong man. In time, he will come to know this. I do not want anyone to avenge my death. Instead, I want you to stop killing people. God bless.”

Now, I am not writing this to take a position for or against the death penalty. This issue has become more relevant to me of late, but, perhaps more importantly, it’s become increasingly topical for the nation as well.

As the US Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of executions by lethal injection, i.e. whether that method is cruel and unusually painful, the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice is also considering whether to narrow the definition of what constitutes a capital crime, which now includes 33 “special circumstance” allegations.

My renewed interest developed when I started writing my third true crime book, Killer with a Conscience, which is scheduled to be published by Kensington/Pinnacle in April 2009. The book chronicles the case of the long-haul trucker and serial killer Wayne Adam Ford (pictured above), who was convicted of murdering four women in California, two of whom he dismembered, and then dumping them in waterways. After being sentenced last March, he is now one of the 660-plus prisoners on Death Row at San Quentin.

I write crime fiction, too, but my first true crime book, Poisoned Love, was about the murder case of Kristin Rossum, an attractive young toxicologist who was convicted of fatally poisoning her husband with the powerful narcotic painkiller fentanyl. Prosecutors said she stole the drug from her lab at the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office; Rossum claimed her husband obtained it himself and committed suicide. She, too, was eligible for the death penalty, but the district attorney only sought a life sentence without the possibility of parole (LWOP), so that's what the jury gave her. (Some legal experts speculated that the DA didn’t think he could win a death sentence for such a pretty defendant, and that it may not be a good idea to try in an election year.)

Rossum was arrested for murder by poison and still proclaims her innocence. Ford turned himself in with a woman’s breast in his pocket and cooperated with authorities to help give his victims’ families some closure. He claimed the deaths were accidental during rough sex and erotic asphyxiation. Although he tried to revive them with CPR, he said, he was unsuccessful. During sentencing, however, the judge indicated that four accidents was two or three too many for that rationalization to hold up, so he confirmed the jury’s recommendation for a death sentence.

If things continue as they are, Ford’s appeals will wind their way through the justice system for at least the next 15 years. If he loses those appeals, he may still die in prison of natural causes before he is executed.

California not only has the biggest backlog of death penalty cases, it also has the largest Death Row population. The amount of time prisoners wait to be executed after being convicted is double the national average.

No one has been executed in California for two years. The state’s three-drug protocol was halted at San Quentin in February 2006, just before the scheduled execution of Michael Morales, when a federal district court judge, Jeremy Fogel, decided that the protocol needed to be changed.

Fogel ordered that the three drugs, which had been administered one at a time in succession, be replaced with barbiturates so inmates wouldn’t feel any pain. The first drug in the cocktail had been an analgesic, sodium pentothal. The second was pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes all muscles in the body, including the diaphragm, and stops a person from breathing. And the third was potassium chloride, which stops the heart from beating and, without sufficient anesthetic, apparently causes a person to feel as though his veins are on fire. Opponents have argued that six out of the 11 prisoners given lethal injections in California may not have been sufficiently anesthetized.

Fogel also ordered that a medical professional monitor the execution. It was this order that stopped the execution, because no doctor would cross the ethical line of participating, even as an observer, in killing a human being because it violated the Hippocratic Oath.

I actually went to San Quentin twice to witness the Thompson execution as a staff writer for The San Diego Union-Tribune, where I covered jails and prisons at the time. The first time, in 1997, the execution was stayed only hours before it was scheduled to happen. It finally proceeded in July 1998.

This was something I felt I should do – just once – so that I was knowledgeable about the issue of capital punishment. If I was going to write about murderers, I felt it was important to actually see the ramifications of delivering a death sentence and I did not take that responsibility lightly.

Nonetheless, it was not easy to watch another human being be killed, regardless of the circumstances. I had learned through my research that Thompson’s codefendant told the state parole board many years after Thompson was convicted that the rape prosecutors cited as Thompson’s motive for murder, which also made him eligible for a death sentence, had looked more like consensual sex. The codefendant’s family was wealthy enough to hire a private attorney and he did not get the death penalty.

Advocates say the death penalty is a deterrent and provides necessary justice for the victims and their families. It makes them feel that society is safer, having the death penalty in place. Some believe in the Biblical “eye for an eye,” while others say, “some people just have to die” because they are too evil to remain living. Some believe the death penalty is only appropriate for those who commit the most heinous crimes such as serial killers, mass murderers or people who molest and kill children.

Opponents counter that the death penalty kills with a disproportionate ethnic and socioeconomic bias, executing more blacks than whites. (To my knowledge, no one is making a big deal about this, but it also kills far more men than women.) They also say that given the number of people who have been executed and later found innocent, the system is fatally flawed.

As I have been doing research on the Ford case – and this has always been one of my favorite parts about being a journalist and now an author – I've learned a few things about the death penalty.

I learned that 36 of the 50 states use capital punishment, that New Jersey just eliminated it and Colorado and Maryland are looking at abolishing it.

I was aware that death penalty cases were more expensive than those culminating with life sentences, but I was surprised to learn just how much more:

--It costs California taxpayers more than $114 million a year to maintain the death penalty system over and above the cost of administering LWOP sentences and that figure doesn't even count the costs of prosecution. (This is according to a 2005 story in the Los Angeles Times. A Sacramento Bee story said the state could save $90 million by abolishing the death penalty.)

--In North Carolina, according to a Duke University study, capital cases cost at least an extra $2.16 million per execution, compared to the cost of prosecuting and sentencing defendants for LWOP.

--Florida spends $3.2 million per capital case, according to the Miami Herald.

--And Texas spends $2.3 million per capital case – about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell in maximum security for 40 years, according to a story in the Dallas Morning News from 1992.

California has executed only 13 of its Death Row prisoners since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The state would have to execute one inmate a day for almost two years to clear the decks.

In all likelihood, a good number of these inmates won’t be executed before they die of natural causes, so taxpayers will have to pay to house them for life terms anyway – after also paying the higher cost of prosecuting them as death cases and subsidizing the appeals that go along with that. (It costs an annual $34,000 to house just one prisoner, and presumably even more for each inmate on Death Row, where security is higher.)

“That is the most expensive possible system imaginable,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of The Death Penalty Information Center, an organization that says it is critical of the death penalty but not on moral grounds. “It’s the worst of both worlds.”

Meanwhile, California Gov. Schwarzenegger has just proposed the release of 22,000 nonviolent prisoners because of the state’s budget problems, while the state builds a new execution chamber and adds more capacity to Death Row, which is comprised of all single cells, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

I have to wonder – if more of the general population was more aware of all these costs, would people still choose to maintain this measure of safety?