Word: opinion
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...They Crazy? Such professional disagreement does 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...
...Sirhan trial are all fully 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...
...deemed insane under any legal definition, he is not responsible for his criminal act at the time he committed it and therefore cannot be blamed for it. Says U.C.L.A. Psychiatrist John Suarez, "sane or insane is equivalent to guilty or not guilty." While psychiatrists are equipped to give an opinion of a man's mental state, they bridle at being asked to say whether a man should be blamed for a specific act, since this goes well beyond the frontiers of their expertise. Frederick Hacker, a psychiatrist who teaches at the University of Southern California's law center...
...more likely approach, advocated by both lawyers and psychiatrists, would change court rules. Experts could testify fully on the defendant's mental state, but would not be forced to render opinion on the ultimate question of responsibility. "That's a decision for the jury," says U.C.L.A.'s Suarez. Federal Judge David Bazelon adds that "the decision is often painfully difficult, and perhaps its very difficulty accounts for the readiness with which we have encouraged the experts to decide the question." In a democratic society, which believes in letting its citizens decide how offenders should be treated...
...most ominous potential of any centralized regulation, of course, lies in its possible abuse. Overzealous but underimaginative censors might not stop at snipping out broads and brawls but might press on to new frontiers of blandness. Legitimate controversy or merely inconvenient opinion aired on television would also fall under the censor's watchful eye. "What is proposed," says Leonard Freeman, producer of CBS's Hawaii Five-O, "is Orwellian in its prospect. We are now overly cautious; the result is a vacuum years behind the audience...