IMPORTANT
FACTS
1. Psychiatry’s and psychology’s
influence in the courtroom has eroded the once-firm basis of justice: the differentiation
of right and wrong.
2. The psychiatric “insanity
defense” and its derivatives have done the most damage.
3. Psychiatric “expert”
witnesses are widely criticized for providing testimony to suit their clients’
purposes.
4. Psychiatry is not
based on science and has failed to cure insanity (despite taxpayer funding in
the billions of dollars) and should no longer be accepted as an authority by
our courts.
CHAPTER
ONE The Breakdown of Law and Order
Celebrated nineteenth century humorist and author Mark Twain noted, “Insanity
is certainly on the increase in the world, and crime is dying out. … Formerly
if you killed a man, it was possible that you were insane— but now if you …
kill a man it is evidence that you are a lunatic.”
Once there was the idea that a person is responsible for his own actions. It
is an idea that has gone the way of the dinosaur.
Take this case of prominent Virginia attorney T. Brook Howard—an all-too-common
scenario. His client admitted to having kidnapped a 30-year-old woman, holding
her hostage for over nine hours, during which period he repeatedly sexually
assaulted her.
With great conviction, Howard explained to the judge and jury that what the
victim had experienced—the abduction, the psychological torture and the repeated
rapes—were not his client’s fault. A psychiatrist’s testimony said his client
just couldn’t help himself; that it was an “irresistible impulse.”
On the basis of the psychiatrist’s grotesque testimony, the rapist was acquitted.
If criminals are able to evade the consequences of their actions through this
type of perversion of the principles of justice, then the very tool that society
has to protect itself has been obliterated.
Thomas Szasz in his book, The Myth of Mental Illness, is uncompromising
on this point: “The introduction of psychiatric considerations into the administration
of the criminal law— for example, the insanity plea and verdict, diagnoses of
mental incompetence to stand trial, and so forth— corrupt the law and victimize
the subject on whose behalf they are ostensibly employed.”
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