Insanity
Defense
Although the insanity defense is introduced in less than 2% of all criminal
trials, it is one of the most controversial and hotly debated issues in American
and British criminal law. Professor Francis Allen said of it, “The issue of
criminal responsibility has attracted more attention and stimulated more controversy
than any other question in the substantive criminal law.”
Dr. Margaret Hagen, Ph.D., a Boston University lecturer in psychology and
law, says that there only appears to be a low percentage of insanity defense
use, “The statistics are true when we look only at straight cases of Not Guilty
by Reason of Insanity.” But what changes the picture significantly are defenses
such as “diminished mental ability,” which induce prosecutors to bring a lesser
charge as well as cases in which the alleged mental condition reduces the amount
of time served.
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 was incensed about the lack of a scientific basis
for psychiatrists’ testimony, whose opinions were therefore in conflict with
each other: “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.”
Jeffery Harris, Executive Director of the U.S. Attorney General’s Task Force
on Violent Crime, observed, “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. 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?’ The insanity defense is being used as a football … and quite
frankly, you’d be better off calling Central Casting to get ‘expert psychiatric
testimony’ in a criminal trial.”
Professor Szasz adds, “It is unlikely that toxicologists would be tolerated
in courts of law if one would observe that he found a large quantity of arsenic
in the body of a deceased person, and another stated that he found by the same
operation none. Yet this sorry spectacle is commonplace in regard to psychiatric
findings.”
Dr. Hagen, who authored Whores of the Court, The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony
and the Rape of American Justice, says: “Why not just flip pennies or draw
cards? Why not put on a blindfold and choose without being able to identify
the patients? It could hardly hurt [the diagnostic] accuracy rate that hovers
at less than one out of three times correct. … There is no psychological cure
for the desire to beat up women, to rape and murder them. The very idea that
[psychology] today could even pretend to such an ability is ludicrous ….”
In view of such eminent good sense, how is it that we face the absurd situation
of psychiatrists testifying to excuse the wrongdoers’ actions? Especially in
view of the fact they have proven beyond doubt their inability to agree with
each other, let alone cure anyone.
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