Читать книгу The Measure of Madness: - Katherine Ramsland - Страница 10

Sometimes, when I am retained to evaluate a defendant, there is no question about whether he or she is guilty of the crime. In all of the cases in the first part of this book, the defendants had already confessed and my job was to assess their mental state at the time of the crime.

It is the burden of the defense to prove that a defendant was insane or lacked criminal responsibility for his or her conduct. In other words, it must be proved that “at the time of such conduct, as a result of mental disease or defect, he lacked substantial capacity to know or appreciate either: (1) the nature and consequences of such conduct; or (2) that such conduct was wrong.”¹

The general public inaccurately believes that the insanity defense is widely used and is frequently successful. In actuality, this is not the case. The insanity defense is only raised in approximately one percent of cases and successful in approximately 20 percent of these cases.²

If a defendant is judged to be insane, he or she is legally not guilty of the offense. Typically, the individual is then sent to a forensic psychiatric hospital. By law, he would remain there until the presiding judge rules he is no longer dangerously mentally ill. At that point he would be transferred to a state psychiatric hospital and, if his condition continued to improve, after a period of time (usually measured in years), he could be released to the community.

The first part of The Measure of Madness deals with fourteen cases in which the legal question was the defendants’ states of mind at the time they committed their crimes. Mr. Paulson confessed to killing his wife, but claimed he loved her. Mr. Abrams was also charged with the murder of his wife, but he insisted that he had no memory of it. In one chapter I discuss my work with Daniel Rakowitz who became headline news after his arrest for the killing of his roommate. It was rumored that he cooked her remains. Mr. Bailey was one of the most heartbreaking cases. He was only 22 years old when he aimed his gun at a group of police officers in an apparent “suicide by cop.” In one chapter I review the cases of four bizarre and psychotic defendants who were charged with the murder or attempted murder of strangers. One claimed the victims were aliens and another insisted he was an undercover agent and the victim had “come back from the dead.”

Yet another chapter in this part details the cases of two young women who raised a different psychiatric defense. Both claimed to be suffering from Battered Woman’s Syndrome and raised the defense of extreme emotional disturbance. One was nine months pregnant when she stabbed her sleeping husband and then slit her own wrists. The other told me she was hearing voices at the time she killed her husband.

The defense for both these women hinged upon whether they acted “under the influence of extreme emotional disturbance for which there was a reasonable explanation or excuse, the reasonableness of which is to be determined from the viewpoint of a person in the defendant’s situation under the circumstances as the defendant believed them to be.”³

If these women were found to have acted under extreme emotional disturbance, they would still be convicted of a crime, but the degree of the crime would be lessened. Instead of being convicted of murder, the women would be convicted of manslaughter. In one of these cases I was hired by the defense attorney, in the other, by the prosecution. In both cases I needed to put myself in the position of these women to understand what drove them to kill.