Word: presenting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Communist countries of Asia, the Soviets present a remarkably bourgeois face. Aware that China's subversive tactics have given Communism a bad name among Asian governments, the Russians play down politics, deal directly and frankly with the regime in power, and base their appeal chiefly on the offer of trade and cultural ties...
...Nonetheless, psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists, who tend to believe that unconscious forces determine a man's deeds, are more likely to find an offender nonresponsible; those who deal primarily with graphs showing abnormal brain activity, or other biological symptoms, may be unwilling to concede insanity unless these factors are present. Calculating the effects his testimony will have, one expert may overstate a judgment because he knows that a jury's finding of insanity will start proceedings to commit the offender to a mental institution; another may be influenced by the thought that more rehabilitation will be possible...
Margin for Error. Such cases would raise perplexing professional problems under the most clinical of circumstances. Is an accused criminal presently sick? Psychologists know that batteries of tests, such as the Rorschach and Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory used on Sirhan, show only the probability that a man has certain personality traits; they have a built-in margin of error when applied to one individual. Even though experts may agree on the diagnosis of a man's present state, they often have difficulties when pressed to project it back to his condition at the time of the crime. The link...
...most common disagreements arise when experts are pressed to take a third step away from the defendant's present condition. With few exceptions, they are asked to decide whether his mental state during the crime made him fit the legal definition of a word which few psychiatrists use: insanity. Under the 126-year-old M'Naghten rule, insanity is not knowing what one is doing, or not knowing that it is wrong. However, many people who can tell right from wrong are nonetheless patients in mental hospitals, and some courts permit more elastic definitions-such as the Durham...
...others propose, not to testify but to advise the court on how to control dangerous offenders and how to treat and rehabilitate the rest. This solution would end courtroom squabbles over the question of responsibility, but could raise a host of new problems and require a drastic reform in present legal processes. It might, for instance, lead to further disputes about whether to send a man to a prison or to a mental hospital for rehabilitation. Ultimately it might require doing away with the distinction between prisons and asylums altogether. It might also tuck away in an administrative process what...