Word: psychiatrists
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...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 had been written under the mirror's hypnotic influence, even the star rebuttal witness, Psychiatrist Seymour Pollack, told of the assassin's "paranoid personality." Pollack, however, asserted that the assassination of Kennedy was "triggered by political reasons with which he [Sirhan] was highly emotionally charged." Altogether, as the trial enters its final stages this week, the prosecution faces an uphill struggle to refute contentions...
Biased Toward Blame. When forced to answer the question, as they frequently are, psychological experts will often fall back on the premise of their training. Wisconsin's Halleck notes that the average psychiatrist is slightly biased toward blame because in day-to-day practice he has found that "if he is ever going to help people overcome their difficulties, he must constantly implore them to assume responsibility for their actions." 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...
...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...
...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 is unprovable: no psychiatrist was there, and as University of Wisconsin Psychiatrist Seymour Halleck has observed, "because of the enormous psychological impact of an offender's crime, incarceration, and trial, his emotional state is constantly changing...
...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...