In The Mad, the Bad, and the Innocent Barbara Kirwin, a forensic psychologist who has assessed some 200 defendants for their mental fitness for trial or conviction in Long Island and New York City, including the famous cases of Stephanie Wernick (who gave birth in a stall in the ladies' room of her college dorm, strangled him with wads of toilet paper then discarded him in the trash), Joel Rifkin (who brutally killed seventeen prostitutes), and Chandran Nathan (who shot the fiancee of a woman he found attractive forty times with an automatic weapon through the door of his house), tells us what she finds wrong with the judicial system's handling of the mentally ill and the putatively mentally ill, and recommends improvements.
She decries "designer defenses", defenses designed to fit the defendant in question and have no legitimate psychiatric basis but can confuse the jury or appeal to their sentiments, such as Dan White's so-called "Twinkie defense", many cases of "battered woman syndrome", and post-traumatic stress disorder, because they undermine legitimate psychiatry and can misdirect sane defendants from prison to mental hospital.
She observes that defendants found mentally ill often stay confined longer than they would have in prison. For example David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam" serial killer, who killed six people in 1978, almost certainly insane, strategically pleaded guilty, received a 25-year sentence, which will end in 2003. He has unlikely received treatment for the illness that occasioned his murders but when his sentence ends he will leave prison. Similar killers found mentally ill stay confined in mental hospitals all their lives. She also observes that we spend much more money on a prison inmate than confinement in a mental hospital.
She does admit that defendants who know how to manipulate the judicial system can avoid a conviction on grounds of mental incompetence then prove their sanity afterwards (since they never lost their mental competence) to gain release earlier than they would have had the courts convicted them.
She corrects the widespread misconception that courts find defendants mentally incompetent than very rarely. And she notes that states that have made such pleas nearly impossible have not convicted more perpetrators since most findings of mental incompetence keep the defendant out of court as not mentally capable of standing trial.
To address these problems she makes "three major proscriptions:
To evaluate technical psychological issues in court cases she recommends that the courts maintain a list of certified experts, that the court assign a panel of three on a rotating, random basis, to each case. This would prevent wealthy clients hiring experts who could design a defense at the expense of the facts. Additionally she recommends that we standardize forensic exams, discard subjective tests, and professional organizations of forensic psychologists sanction perpetrators of unethical or unprofessional conduct who undermine the profession and its useful role in court.
She does not think juries can understand the complexities and subtleties of establishing mental incompetence. She thinks that many judges cannot and recommends that we train and credential judges for this purpose.
In this discussion I left out all the "fun" aspects of her book: the grisly crimes, the fantastic delusions of their perpretators, the cool calculation of the psychopath who knows how to manipulate the system to his advantage, the cracks in the system that allow dangerous people free. You can find them all in her book, she did not neglect the value of making her book interesting to read. She weaves her discussion of the system with stories from her own files and those of famous cases. I discovered that until the conviction of Stephanie Wernick for the murder of her newborn in 1993 that no American or British court had ever convicted a mother for neonaticide. Dr Kirwin tells the story of Ann Green, whose first two children died of SIDS on their first day home from the hospital. On the birth of her third the hospital kept him in hospital for two weeks because of the outcome of his siblings. On his first day home from the hospital a neighbor found Ann Green suffocating him and called the police. A jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity for the murder of her first two children and the attempted murder of her third, on account of postpartum psychosis (even after two weeks's delay in the last case), of which she showed no symptoms other than murdering her children. The court returned her third child to her.
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