Forensic Psychology For Dummies (100 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
Personality disorder
is a catch-all increasingly being used to claim diminished responsibility. The defendant is presented to the court as having an enduring set of characteristics that causes his behaviour to be pervasively and inflexibly antisocial. Because of this condition, he can’t fully control his actions and so isn’t fully responsible for them. I discuss aspects of this disorder in more detail in Chapter 10.
The Twinkie defence!
Dan White was accused of shooting the mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, and city supervisor, Harvey Milk, in 1978. As part of their defence, his lawyers claimed that White suffered from manic-depression (now called bipolar disorder) and that his condition was made much worse when he binged on soft drinks and junk foods. Although Twinkies (an American sugary sponge cake bar) weren’t named in the proceedings, the tongue-in-cheek term of the Twinkie defence caught on (to indicate an improbable defence). White was convicted of ‘involuntary manslaughter’ due to diminished capacity, rather than murder.
This defence could never have happened in Britain . . . because Twinkies aren’t for sale in the UK. Perhaps you can think of an equivalent sugary defence!
Making sense of madness
If you’re a bit confused about the legal definition of insanity and diminished responsibility, don’t worry . . . you’re in good company! Intense debate continues to rage between experts about most of the issues I mention in the preceding section. Even more importantly, juries are often confused as well. Studies indicate that juries are often reluctant to accept an insanity defence, whereas judges are more inclined to do so. This tension puts pressure on the forensic psychologist or other expert witnesses to be able to provide an objective report that the court finds acceptable.
One of the difficulties faced when forming an opinion about someone’s mental state at the time of crime, is that it’s a retrospective examination of the psychological condition of the person months or even years earlier. Necessarily, this assessment relies on the account that a person, or people who know him, gives about his thoughts and emotions at that time.
Exposing malingering
One of the most important aspects of any assessment of a defendant is to determine if the symptoms he describes are genuine (which is somewhat different from detecting attempted deception that I discuss in Chapter 5). If he does not have the symptoms or is faking them in some way it’s known as ‘malingering’. In this case, the forensic psychologist isn’t evaluating the truthfulness of what the person says, but whether the mental state of the individual and related experiences indicate some psychological condition or relevance to the trial. Some standardised tests (that I mention in Chapter 9) have been developed for determining this malingering. A carefully structured clinical interview has also been shown to be very useful. More informally, malingering may be indicated by:
Realising he’d been caught out, Bianchi agreed to testify against his cousin Angelo Buono who was charged with him, but he still got multiple life sentences (though not one for each personality!).
Assessing insanity
Besides the determination of malingering that I discuss in the preceding section, surprisingly little standardisation exists in assessing a person’s mental state at the time of the crime. The clinician has to determine as best as possible what dysfunctions were present in intellectual, emotional and behavioural aspects of the defendant at that key time when the crime happened, and how those disturbances relate to the criminal act.
These assessments are usually made on as wide a range of information as possible, not just a carefully structured interview of the person concerned. This information usually includes: