The Abuse Excuse. - book reviews

Nutrition Health Review, Wntr, 1995

There are a host of new complaints flooding the courts: abused child syndrome, black rage, battered woman syndrome, posttraumatic stress disorder, urban survival syndrome, rape trauma, repressed memory, crimes of passion, Super Bowl Sunday syndrome, and many more.

According to the author, a well-known defense attorney and Harvard law professor, "abuse excuses" like these are enabling people to get away with murder. Consider the travesty of justice many people say surrounded the trials of the Menendez brothers, who admitted to the killing of their parents, and Lorena Bobbit, who justified her mutilation of her husband by a bizarre defense. The culprits admit they committed the crimes but seek exoneration by arguing that they are not legally responsible.

The reasons they give: that they are victims of an abusive parent, a violent spouse, a traumatic experience, ethnic hatred -- and whatever else could justify killing the "oppressor."

The book is replete with essays based on contemporary events, including those of O.J. Simpson, Tonya Harding, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, and other celebrities who have managed to make the news headlines in performances not listed among their professional achievements.

How much will the national psyche be affected by legal logic that turns the concepts of guilt and responsibility on its head? How healthful can such a topsy turvy logic be for a society that maintains its moorings principally by an adherence to the logic of truth and justice?

Dershowitz ends his book with a glossary of abuse excuses. He deplores the need for exhibiting such a voluminous list of logicdefying reasons for legal defenses and litigation. Perhaps the ludicrousness of the logic involved. Consider "black rage" defense (Colin Ferguson murdered six people on the Long Island Railroad); "battered person syndrome" (he killed his stepfather for abusing his mother); "chronic lateness syndrome" (a school superintendent killed his boss for terminating employment for being constantly late for work); and the "twinkie defense syndrome (Dan White was found guilty of manslaughter, not first-degree murder, for killing Harvey Milk. The jury accepted the defendants' claim that he had become mentally incapacitated because of his consumption of junk foods).