Confronting the breakdown of law and order - responsibility of psychiatry for law and order problems

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Jan, 1997 by Bruce Wiseman

DURING THE 1995 New Mexico legislative session, State Sen. Duncan Scott proposed an amendment to a bill stating: "When a psychologist or psychiatrist testifies during a defendant's competency hearing, the psychologist or psychiatrist shall wear a cone-shaped hat that is not less than 2 feet tall. The surface of the hat shall be imprinted with stars and lightning bolts. . . ."

While the New Mexico State Senate was voting in favor of the "Wizard's hat" amendment, a Florida columnist proposed another solution. He recommended that the confusion created by psychiatric "experts" be reduced by placing a red light and a digital display above the witness stand indicating the price paid for the testimony.

The New Mexico bill was not signed into law, and digital displays and red lights have not been installed. Both solutions might have reminded judges and juries of the actual value of "expert" psychiatric and psychological testimony.

Justice is based on the concept that each man is responsible for what he does and accountable for his actions. However, psychiatry has pushed society to a state of chaos wherein no one is responsible for anything. A wife can mutilate her husband; children can kill their parents; and a man can shoot the President - yet, psychiatrists claim the perpetrators are themselves the victims, and therefore, not guilty. Psychiatric testimony often serves to occlude the fact that a crime has been committed, prolong litigation, and drive the cost of justice even higher.

Psychiatrists' inability to assess and predict human behavior is a well-documented fact. In one typical study, two "skilled psychiatrists" each chose six of 20 patients as being depressed - but they were not the same six.

Psychiatric testimony is valueless in adjudicating criminal intent. In 1988, psychologist Jay Ziskin indicated: "Studies show that professional clinicians do not in fact make more accurate clinical judgments than lay persons." Defense attorneys are aware of this and have been known to "shop around" for a psychiatric report that will serve their purposes. Hence, the red light to expose the nature of the witness and the digital display to advise the jury at what price the criminal's "illness" was manufactured.

"What amazes me is that, in any trial I've ever heard of, the defense psychiatrist always says the accused is insane, and the prosecuting psychiatrist always says he's sane," Jeffery Harris, executive director of the Attorney General's Task Force on Violent Crime, points out. "This happened invariably, in 100% of the cases, thus far exceeding the laws of chance. You have to ask yourself, `What is going on here?'"

Even when courts do not accept the psychobabble, its introduction into the legal process has come close to destroying Americans' faith in justice. Examples include the "Twinkie" defense, blaming the sugar in the snack cake for driving the accused to crime, and the murder trial in which a psychiatrist testified that a man murdered his wife because of the movie (which made its debut one month after the crime), "Crocodile Dundee."

Psychiatrists even have given Americans another reason to stay indoors during the winter's cold. According to psychiatrist Marc Sageman, murders committed during cold weather are not a crime. In 1995, he testified that Joseph Harris killed his ex-supervisor, her boyfriend, and two former co-workers because he "hated the onset of winter."

The justice system has been subverted so thoroughly that gross injustices such as in the New York trial of April Dell'Olio are common. Dell'Olio was acquitted of murder by reason of insanity and, because two psychiatrists testified she did not pose a danger to society, was released with no incarceration whatsoever. Presiding Judge Kevin Dowd said the insanity defense laws forced him to treat the killing "with the psychiatric equivalent that April had a bad hair day' on Oct. 20, 1992."

These two psychiatrists provided "expert" testimony on a matter they knew themselves unqualified to adjudicate. In 1979, an American Psychiatric Association task force admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court that "psychiatric expertise in the prediction of `dangerousness' is not established and clinicians should avoid `conclusionary judgments in this regard.'"

The Supreme Court concurred, stating that "professional literature uniformly established that such predictions are fundamentally of very low reliability, and that psychiatric testimony and expertise are irrelevant to such predictions. In view of these findings, psychiatric testimony on the issue of future criminal behavior only distorts the fact finding process."

It was not always this way. Once, there was no set definition of insanity, and the courts had difficulty in determining who was or was not conscious of what they were doing.

That changed in 1843, when Daniel M'Naughten shot the British Prime Minister's secretary and was acquitted on the grounds of insanity. Fearing the ruling would establish a precedent making it easier to excuse criminal behavior, the English Parliament passed a measure known as the "right-wrong" test. As this legislation contained the words "at the time of committing the act," it opened the door to the "temporary insanity" plea.