Word: diamonds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Arcane Experiments. The candles swayed and changed color. Really? Sirhan insisted that it was no trick of imagination, reported Dr. Bernard L. Diamond. The noted psychoanalyst, who combines professorships in law, psychiatry and criminology at the University of California at Berkeley, was the star witness for Sirhan's defense. His testimony buttressed the diagnoses of five other experts that Sirhan was afflicted with paranoia and schizophrenia. Diamond reconnoitered the darkening recesses of the assassin's mind. One key to the killing, Diamond insisted, must be found in Sirhan's arcane experiments with the mirror. It was during...
Photographers' flashbulbs and the mirrors inside the Ambassador Hotel-and four Tom Collinses-acted with hypnotic power, Diamond testified. Fuzzy with drink, Sirhan wandered in a trance until he encountered Kennedy in a serving pantry. "Only this time it was for real," said Diamond. "This time there was only the loaded gun." It was, he admitted, a "preposterous story, unlikely and incredible." It was also, Diamond insisted, what really happened...
Gasping for Breath. Sirhan professes that he has no recollection of shooting Kennedy last June. However, Diamond was able to make the assassin relive the killing in his prison cell six months later by hypnotizing him with a coin held eight inches from his eyes. "Sirhan simply pulled an imaginary gun out of his belt," Diamond recounted to the court, "and fired it convulsively again and again and shouted out: 'You son of a bitch...
Prosecutor David Fitts peppered the diminutive professor with hostile questions, but he could not blunt the thrust of Diamond's testimony about murder in a trance. A far-out tale? Perhaps. A grave problem of determining mental health in criminal trials is that expert witnesses are almost always available to back up either prosecution or defense with their testimony (see BEHAVIOR). After two more psychologists declared that Sirhan suffers from grave mental disorders, avuncular Attorney Grant Cooper rested for the defense. And though a handwriting expert called by the prosecution saw no evidence that Sirhan's diary...
...nothing to enhance the layman's opinion of psychiatry and its related fields. Nor does the fact that psychiatrists in the witness chair frequently couch their findings in language that either boggles the layman's mind or defies surface credibility. Even highly respected California Psychiatrist Bernard L. Diamond, key defense witness last week at the Sirhan trial, admitted that the jury might have trouble believing his testimony that Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy while in a self-induced hypnotic trance. To the layman, this would be an "absurd, preposterous story, unlikely and incredible," he allowed. The reputation of psychiatric...