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Insanity Defense: Hired Guns for the Highest Bidder

Two California juries became hopelessly deadlocked in the trials of Erik and Lyle Menendez, adult brothers who purchased guns and planned the brutal double murder of their parents in the family’s $4 million home.  A team of psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists were hired to build the defense.  Psychologist Ann Tyler testified that the brothers suffered from “learned helplessness” as a result of intense, repeated abuse.  On cross-examination, however, the therapist admitted that the horrendous anecdotes the brothers told were uncorroborated.  Another “diagnosis” offered up was “battered person syndrome.”  Still another psychologist claimed the boys had “post-traumatic stress disorder.”

One of the jurors remarked, “I don’t think the general public thinks the jury is any more than a bunch of idiots.”  But what crippled the two sets of 12 men and women was the fact that no two psychiatrists or psychologists could agree on the boys’ mental diagnosis, and the psychiatric notion that criminality is excusable.

An essay on the case, published in TIME, said, “Victimology has turned to be the winning tactic of our era.  In the Menendez case, the law has been so stretched that an ‘unreasonable’ belief that one is in danger of serious harm…can be sufficient grounds for self-defense.  How did we go from a society that distinguished right from wrong to one that understands all and punishes nothing?”

The American Psychiatric Association says that psychiatrists cannot predict violent behavior, yet courts still defer to psychiatrists and psychologists to determine criminal or violent behavior.  The Supreme Court has rendered the opinion that “the professional literature uniformly establishes 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.”

Because of the lack of science in psychiatric diagnostic procedures, it is easy for criminals to fake “mental illness” symptoms.  Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, the boss of a New York crime family, was convicted of racketeering and murder conspiracy.  Feigning mental illness for more than 30 years, whenever he went to trial, the mobster hired psychiatrists who testified that he suffered from “paranoid schizophrenia, dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease.”  In 2003, Gigante admitted he was a fake and had easily misled the highest paid psychiatrists.

Facts:

  • In June 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of the State of Arizona to pass a law that excluded many forms of psychiatric testimony in criminal cases.  The Court quoted a legal source in support of its decision, stating, “No matter how the test for insanity is phrased, a psychiatrist or psychologist is no more qualified than any other person to give an opinion about whether a particular defendant’s mental condition satisfies the legal test for insanity.”

  • The rate of psychiatrists and psychologists agreeing on a diagnosis is less than one out of three times, prompting Dr. Margaret Hagen Ph.D., author of Whores of the Court, The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice, to comment: “Why not just flip pennies or draw cards?”

  • According to trial judge Ralph Adam Fine in Escape of the Guilty, “Although psychiatry clothes itself in the trappings of science and seeks to influence the standards by which we decide criminal responsibility, strict reliability in its diagnoses is rare.”  Chief Justice Warren Burger put it more strongly: “No rule of law can possibly be sound or workable which is dependent upon the terms of another discipline whose members are in profound disagreement about what those terms mean.”

  • A study published in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, determined that criminal behavior—not “mental illness”—is the single biggest predictor of future criminal behavior.  So-called schizophrenics exhibited a lower rate of criminal recidivism than the comparison subjects in the study and were “a less dangerous group upon release.”

    BOGUS SCIENCE

    Purchased psychiatric testimony—at a cost of millions of dollars each year—has resulted in bizarre claims by psychiatrists, such as:

  • The defense of a rapist, claiming he had “Gone with the Wind Syndrome” to justify an alleged belief that sex should be performed only with resistance from the woman. “Moral Insanity,” a defense used by a psychologist to justify the rape of two female patients.

  • “Meek-Mate Syndrome,” to describe the condition of California man who killed his wife because she ridiculed him in public and forced him to sleep on the floor.

  • Clerambault-Kandinsky syndrome, where a psychologist testified that a chief judge of New York State, charged with extortion and threatening to kidnap the teenage daughter of his ex-lover, “was manifesting advanced symptoms of CKS,” described as involving an irresistible lovesickness or “erotomania.”

    • Numbers in parenthesis of the disorders used in criminal trials indicate the insurance billing numbers of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

  • Telephone scatalogia (302.90):  A psychiatrist argued that Richard Berendzen, forced to resign his presidency of American University after being arrested for making obscene phone calls, suffered from paraphilia (perverted sexual behavior).

  • Sleepwalking disorder (307.46): This diagnosis was used successfully in the 1980s defense of a Canadian man charged with the murder of his wife’s parents, after he drove 15 miles across Toronto in the middle of the night to commit the act.

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