Word: mentally
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...qualified, the fact is that many of the best minds in the profession refuse to appear in court, on the grounds that they cannot give adequate and accurate testimony under the rigid rules of the adversary system. As a result, supposedly expert opinion as to a defendant's mental state is sometimes put forward by second-rate practitioners with a talent for publicity...
Nonetheless, there are good reasons why even the best experts should disagree. One is that only difficult borderline mental cases ever get to court in the first place. Defendants who show obvious symptoms of illness are committed to institutions immediately, as incompetent to stand trial. The offenders who are left, Yale Law School Professor Abraham S. Goldstein points out, are usually men who seem calm in the dock even though they may have been seriously disordered at the time of the crime...
...read your article about Geel and its mental asylum [March 14] with great interest. I was in custody of the asylum at the age of two in 1938 and placed with a foster family in Geel. When Germany overran Belgium, I was forced to hide. A few months later, my younger sister joined the same household. Though the whole town knew of our Jewish origin, we lived through the entire war years without any harm, at the constant risk of many peo ple's lives. Never again have I known such love and care...
...colleges with alleged harpsichord builders, guinea-pig breeders, inventors of electronic nutcrackers, boy falconers, girls with pet iguanas, adolescent TV producers and fund-raisers for Biafra. One boy wrote starkly, "I have seared the streets," a sign of the new fad for ghetto toil, which is edging out mental-hospital work as an earnest of social conscience. On the other hand, artistic achievement still earns points. To that end, one Emory applicant used a particularly impressive approach: he sent an anthology of his poetry, urgently requesting its return because the only other copy was in the hands of a publisher...