Brooklyn Zoo (5 page)

Dr. Young and I crossed the hallway and entered a waiting room with chairs and a mounted television. She introduced me to the lawyer, Jim Danziger, and the other psychologist, Dr. Pine. The two psychologists conversed happily. Dr. Pine was just back from a long vacation, and they had a lot to catch up on. Jim recognized my Michigan twang from some time he’d spent in Ohio, and he told me about those years. He was truly friendly and we chatted with some energy. Then a guard came and escorted us through the metal gate and another locked door into a small, windowless room with four chairs and a table.

“First we’ll see Randall Corbin,” Dr. Young told me. “He declined to speak to us once before. He’s accused of trying to kill his wife. He keeps writing letters to her, threatening.”

“He threatened me, too,” said Jim. “Tried to grab me from behind the bars of his cell.”

The psychologists decided that Jim should stand near the door. Dr. Young, Dr. Pine, and I would take the chairs. “Do you feel safe?” I asked them. Never having met any, I assumed prisoners were dangerous.

They both replied no, shrugging their shoulders, but neither of them moved. In the end it didn’t matter, because Mr. Corbin refused to see us. On the basis of this decision, which they believed reflected paranoia and was not in his best interest, both psychologists would recommend that he be found unfit.

The next defendant was Franklin Drury. He was charged with public indecency. He, too, had threatened Jim, not to kill but to sue him. In the hospital he’d been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. I had heard of this but barely knew what it was. The diagnosis came from the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
—the
DSM
, which we had not paid much mind to in graduate school, where we were distinctly not being taught to categorize patients according to collections of observable symptoms. In our outpatient clinic we didn’t have to: unable to provide the support they needed, we did not see anyone with such debilitating problems. The
DSM
was only a book of lists that I might have sat down and read with some benefit. Between George and me we had two copies. But instead I’d chosen to feel ill at ease in my unfamiliarity with its principles.

Franklin Drury had a long psych history: multiple hospitalizations as well as arrests. The guard asked us to remove some paper clips from the table, and then he brought the prisoner in. Mr. Drury had light brown skin and had twisted some of his locks into braids and knots that made his head look like an unfinished macramé project. In a soothing voice, Dr. Young explained to Mr. Drury why we were there and
let him know that our talk was court ordered and therefore not confidential. “Your lawyer believes you’re unable to think clearly,” she said.

“I’ve never seen that man,” Mr. Drury said, barely glancing at Jim before sharply turning away.

“We’ve met a few times,” Jim corrected him.

“How are you doing here?” asked Dr. Young.

“No one will tell me where I am. They won’t give me the address,” he said. “I want to let my mother know I’m okay.”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know who, why, or how I got here. I’ve done nothing to deserve this misery.”

“Do you know what you’ve been charged with?” asked Dr. Pine.

“I don’t know for sure,” he said.

“Menacing,” interjected Jim. “You exposed yourself to two adults and told them you were going to get them, and then you asked two little girls to lift up their skirts.”

“I didn’t,” said Mr. Drury, refusing to look at Jim.

Dr. Young asked some questions to get a sense of our client’s history. He was raised by both parents along with an older sister, did okay in school but hadn’t had many friends, had gotten through five semesters of college before “some people tried to destroy me. They put drugs in my milk.”

“Why would they want to do that?” asked Dr. Young.

“I was studying math, and it was well-known that I was studying,” said Mr. Drury. “A girl was investigating the case when I was in college. She turned up dead.”

Dr. Young and Dr. Pine scribbled notes. They tried to glean whether Mr. Drury understood basic courtroom procedures and whether he had ideas about how to proceed with his
case. He did: he wanted to go to trial. If found guilty, which seemed almost certain, he’d be handed a longer sentence than if he simply took a plea.

“I’m not going to plead out to something I didn’t do. I’ll testify. How can they not believe me? I’m telling the truth. I don’t have time to expose myself to nobody unless it’s a woman I like.”

“There are witnesses. They may also ask the two little girls to testify,” said Dr. Pine. “With your history, why would the jury believe you and not them?”

“People can assert anything, but if they don’t have proof, you can’t put a person in jail,” he said.

“Why would they lie?” asked Dr. Pine.

“I don’t know.” He stopped to think. “Maybe they’re involved with the same people who drugged my milk.”

“How likely do you think that is?” she followed up.

“I’m not sure. It’s just a guess,” he said.

“What kind of sentence do you think you might get if you go to trial?”

“My time has been served,” he said.

“No, it hasn’t,” said Jim.

Mr. Drury could not get past his assertion that he was telling the truth and his belief that if you tell the truth you don’t go to jail. Dr. Young and Dr. Pine agreed that his inability to see things more realistically made him unable to understand the likely consequences of choosing to go to trial. For now, they agreed, he was unfit.

Our third defendant of the day was no more the criminal mastermind of my misguided forensic fantasies than the others. A deaf-mute religious Jew, he had communicated in writing to the officers who’d arrested him that he was the terrorist Mohamed Atta, a Pakistani Nazi, and an employee of
the Israeli secret police—the modern trinity of a disorganized mind. When Dr. Young asked, with paper and pen, how he wanted to proceed with his charges of menacing, he refused to answer. He would not acknowledge her other questions either.

“This is very important,” she wrote to him.

“To you it is very important,” he finally scribbled. “To me it is not.”

She found him unfit.

When we finished at Bellevue, Dr. Young and Dr. Pine invited me to a late lunch. We ate turkey burgers at a diner on Second Avenue along with an administrator they’d run into in the hospital lobby as we were leaving. The three gossiped about their colleagues, paying cursory homage to the idea that they shouldn’t be talking that way in front of an intern. I had no idea whom they were discussing anyway. I’d been happy to be included in their lunch plans, but I felt uncomfortable there, like a girl among men. When lunch ended, Dr. Young said we were finished for the day and that I should go home. As I left the group to take the subway back to Brooklyn alone, Dr. Young put her hand on my forearm with some urgency. “You should always carry ID,” she told me. “And if you ever get arrested, don’t say anything to the police.”

I did jury duty once, in the 1990s, when I lived in Manhattan. The courthouses there are regal, with marble pillars and careening stairways. The Brooklyn criminal courthouse was disappointing in comparison. It looked like any modern office building. On my first morning at the court clinic, I waited before the lobby’s metal detectors, which were preventing throngs of impatient visitors from making their way to the elevator banks. Dr. Young came in and saw me waiting in the
long and slow-moving line. She motioned me toward her and a much shorter queue. “You can go in the employee entrance with your Kings County ID,” she told me. We both passed through the staff metal detector and rode the elevator together to the thirteenth floor making small talk. The sleek elevator moved quickly in response to the press of its buttons, and the spotless corridor into which we emerged was cooled by central air-conditioning. Imperious or not, it was much more pleasant than our G Building.

“Today you’ll meet the master’s-level forensic students,” Dr. Young offered. Sometimes she sounded syrupy and like a Texan, although she was a northerner. “That will be nice for you.”

We entered the office. It was narrow and colored in neutral tones, with a hallway that ran parallel first to a small waiting area and then to four cubicles followed by a space in the back with some chairs. Five people who looked as if they might be master’s-level students were sitting in the chairs, and after Dr. Young waved at them and entered her office—the only self-contained space in the clinic—I introduced myself as the new psychology intern. They were duly impressed. The career options for master’s-level forensic psychologists being limited, they were all contemplating doctoral programs themselves. They asked me where I went to school and wanted to know something about it. When I told them my program’s theoretical orientation was psychoanalytic, they looked at me as if waiting for a punch line. They were very young, these students from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and most of them lived in the far reaches of almost suburbia with their parents. I guessed from the fact that I was expected to sit with them that our roles at the court clinic would not diverge.
I had finished all of my doctoral course work, for God’s sake, and yet here I was stuck beside the master’s students. It felt like a demotion.

With the arrival of Dr. Wolfe my mood improved. I said hello and reintroduced myself, reminding him that we’d met the previous winter when he’d interviewed me. He said he remembered and welcomed me to the court clinic before announcing to the group that he would be teaching the Tuesday seminar, which was apparently a weekly occurrence. That morning he would talk about the history of the fitness to stand trial.

Forensic psychology textbooks trace the idea of fitness to stand trial back to seventeenth-century England. In those days, criminal defendants who refused to respond to the charges against them were given a sort of pretrial during which a jury would decide whether they were “mute of malice” or “mute by visitation of God.” The first verdict decreed them willfully obstreperous and was met with physical punishment that could end only upon response to the charges or death. The second initially applied to the physiologically deaf and mute but was eventually broadened to include the lunatic. The lunatic, forgiven his silence, was exempt from torture.

While the textbooks talked about the seventeenth century, Dr. Wolfe explained that he located the origins of competency in the year 200 and the Talmudic concept of the
shoteh
. The
shoteh
displayed disorganized thinking and behavior. He was exempt from following Jewish law, could not enter into a contract, and was exonerated from punishment. With the establishment of the United States, similar ideas came to be loosely reflected in the Constitution, not only to preserve the rights of the individual, but also to avoid making a mockery
of the court system, whose players and tasks would certainly lose dignity in the process of trying someone quite obviously out of his mind.

The rights guaranteed criminal defendants by the Constitution had been fleshed out over time, and so, too, the definition of fitness to stand trial. The U.S. Supreme Court, Dr. Wolfe told us, established the modern-day competency standard in 1960 with
Dusky v. United States
. Milton Dusky—a thirty-three-year-old chronic schizophrenic accused of being an accessory to the kidnapping and rape of a teenage girl—was initially deemed competent by a judge whose own standard was simply that a defendant be oriented to person, time, and place (that is, know who he is, when it is, and where he is). The justices later overturned Dusky’s conviction on the grounds that this judge’s idea of fitness was incomplete and that Dusky, whose psychiatrist had observed that he was unable “to interpret reality from unreality,” had not indeed been fit to stand trial. The Court established that “the test must be whether [the defendant] has sufficient present ability to consult with his lawyer with a reasonable degree of rational understanding—and whether he has a rational as well as factual understanding of the proceedings against him.” Once treated and found fit according to these standards, Dusky was retried and reconvicted, though with a much lighter sentence the second time around.

Dr. Wolfe told us that in 1974 the New York courts had elaborated on the
Dusky
standard, requiring that a defendant meet six basic criteria in order to be found fit. The first three were relatively easy to ascertain. A defendant must know who he is, where he is, and when it is, or be, as the jargon goes, “oriented in all spheres.” He must be able to perceive, recall, and relate—to communicate effectively about his life and the
world and about the charges against him. He must be able to understand the role of the court principals and procedures, at minimum knowing or being able to learn what a judge and jury do.

The second three criteria were less black-and-white, leaving room for debate among assessors. A defendant must be able to establish a working relationship with his attorney. He must be able to choose rationally among the various legal alternatives available to him and to understand the possible outcomes and consequences of each choice. Finally, he must be sufficiently emotionally stable to maintain coherence throughout the stressful process of a trial. Varying widely across jurisdictions, anywhere between 1.2 and 77 percent of those referred for competency evaluations are found unfit. Dr. Wolfe told us that the Brooklyn forensic team deemed more defendants incompetent than those in any other borough. He was obviously proud of this—of the integrity they brought to the justice system and the protection they provided these defenseless defendants—which made me excited to be a part of it, too.