Word: questionability
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...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, expresses a common professional view when he says " 'Should we blame him?' is a moral question, not a medical question...
Drama of Responsibility. One way out of the morass might be to determine first only the factual question of whether a man committed an illegal act. Psychiatrists would enter the legal process later, as Dr. Karl Menninger and 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...
...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...
Incriminating Statements. Orozco was accused of shooting down another man after a quarrel outside a Dallas bar back in 1966. He later returned to his boardinghouse and went to sleep. At about 4 a.m., four policemen burst into the room and began to question him. Orozco not only admitted that he had been at the scene of the shooting but also confessed to owning a gun that proved to be the murder weapon. At Orozco's trial, one of the arresting officers was permitted to testify to these incriminating statements...