Tagged: forensic psychiatry
sane enough to be convicted/too insane to stand trial
Brian David Mitchell’s kidnapping trial dragged on for years because Utah found him incompetent to stand trial. The feds stepped in and succeeded where Utah failed. They found him competent to stand trial and won a conviction.
That leaves us with a strange paradox: a man who, on one hand, is mentally incompetent to stand trial, and on the other hand, is sane enough to be branded a sex offender and locked up in prison.
How can someone be mentally incompetent and “sane” at the same time?
Simple.
Competency = ability to communicate with attorney and understand the charges, both factually and rationally.
Insanity = not knowing or understanding the consequences of one’s actions at the time a crime was committed.
Oversimplified, but the basic gist.
And:
Competency = the time of the trial.
Insanity = the time of the crime.
They are separate legal standards and mean different things.
So why did the feds find Mitchell competent, while Utah did not?
This article from the Deseret News explains how the feds learned from the state’s mistakes. Essentially, they had the power and privilege of hindsight.
Or does it go back to the Catch-22 in which many Utahans felt trapped?
religion on trial?
Earlier, I wondered about the cultural bases — and potential biases — underpinning conflicting psychiatric evaluations of Brian David Mitchell. The clashing diagnoses seemed to trap Mormons between a rock and a hard place. After all, a large part of whether Mitchell was “insane” rested on whether his religious beliefs were “bizarre”—beliefst based in the LDS faith.
I am not the only one who asked these questions. Salt Lake City Weekly published an interesting piece about the Catch-22 Mormons faced with this Mitchell:
Let’s say the jury of his peers finds him sane. Because we have had an eminent theologian from BYU testify that Immanuel/Mitchell’s religious writings are coherent and well-reasoned, it follows that his crime was a consequence of his beliefs, and therefore not a crime. His beliefs, after all, called for him to take a virgin as a plural wife, the first of seven times seven to enjoy what he called a “quargasm.” He is therefore not guilty by reason of sanity.
If, on the other hand, the jurors, persuaded by the psychiatrist’s testimony that Immanuel/Mitchell’s religious beliefs are bogus and bizarre, find him insane, it follows that Mormon beliefs are insane, since they are one and the same with Immanuel/Mitchell’s beliefs. Believe me, either way this turns out is not good for us down at headquarters.
What place do religious questions have in a criminal trials? In Mitchell’s case, there was probably no way to evaluate his mental health without confronting serious questions about his religious beliefs. However, if “reasonableness” is part of the test, whose religion could possibly earn a passing score? Religion is not about reason. It is about faith.
After the jury found Mitchell guilty yesterday, several jurors spoke in front of the courthouse. One juror noted how Mitchell never spouted off about religion while kidnapping Elizabeth Smart. Instead, he used a knife to her back.
The trial transcript reveals how Mitchell manipulated others without bizarre outbursts or religious justifications:
Viti: And during the times that you observed him engage in such behavior, did you believe that he was being sincere at those times?
Smart: No.
Viti: At any of these times that he engaged with others besides you or Ms. Barzee, did he ever proclaim that he was the Davidic king?
Smart: No.
Viti: Did he ever proclaim he was the one mighty and strong?
Smart: No.
Viti: A prophet?
Smart: No.
Viti: Did he discuss polygamy with anyone?
Smart: No. Viti: Would he tell them to repent?
Smart: No.
Viti: Would you ever observe him with other people shutting his eyes, folding his hands and singing religious hymns?
Smart: Not that I can recall.
In other words, there was method to Mitchell’s madness. He used religion when it suited him.
That, more than his particular beliefs, holds the most evidentiary value—at least to me. It requires no value judgment, no faith, and no cultural bias to see it.
writer as forensic psychiatrist
My criminology professors took great pains to differentiate mental illnessfrom a medical standpoint, and insanity from the perspective of a court of law. This distinction is good and necessary. We cannot – and should not – assume that mental illness causes crime. If that were the case, we could expect criminal behavior from almost everyone with severe clinical depression or Schizophrenia, but that simply does not hold true. On the contrary, mentally ill individuals are more likely to fall victim to crime.
Legal Insanity
Courts in different states use different rules to determine legal insanity:
- M’Naughten Rule: Defendants admit they committed the act, but claim that they did not understand the act was wrong, or that they did not understand what they were doing at the time the act was committed.
- Durham Rule: Defendants must show that their actions directly resulted from mental illness. Therein lies the rub, because causality is tricky business. Can anyone really claim that mental illnesses cause particular actions?
- Irresistible Impulse: Defendants may have known right from wrong, but they could not resist the impulse to commit the crime. and therefore they cannot be held responsible. Maybe a father discovers the babysitter beating his toddler, and cannot stop himself from beating her senseless.
Forensic scientists lend their expertise by determining to a degree of medical certainty whether a defendant meets the insanity standard. Of course, the degree of certainty often comes into question, with battles of the experts on both sides of a case: insane, not insane, maybe insane but in control, etc.
Writer as Forensic Psychiatrist
How often do writers play “forensic psychiatrist,” perhaps without even realizing it? I have been thinking about this lately as I write about the death of one of my siblings – a death that blew up like a tripped land mine, shooting shrapnel through my heart. When I think back to the allegations against him, and the source of those allegations, I find it impossible to understand to any degree of certainty why he acted as he did. More importantly, I do not know whether or how to hold him responsible.
I mean this less in the legal sense than in an emotional one: To what degree do I hold him responsible? Can I – should I? – forgive him because of his own troubled frame of mind? Is it possible to forgive if I do not hold him responsible? Is it possible to hold him responsible if I forgive?
Of course, in a strict legal context, the question of forgiveness never comes into play, but it does in the court of public opinion, where people feel empathy and sympathy for the father who attacks an abusive babysitter, or the mother with severe PPD psychosis who drowns her baby in the bathtub. That is a kind of forgiveness, however different in quality from the one I mean.
More importantly, I wonder if I have the capacity to make such a determination about my own sibling – if this is something I should even take on in the first place. And what standard would I apply?
