Word: yoder
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...jurors never heard that Yoder had been given multiple, seemingly haphazard diagnoses. For instance, bipolar disorder was diagnosed in 1991, but that diagnosis vanished from his records in 1998--even though Yoder never took part in treatment. Jurors also never heard from one of Unsell's potential witnesses, a Chester employee who wouldn't testify for fear of losing his job. That employee, who retired not long ago from his position as a guard supervisor but still fears retribution if identified, told me that Chester staff members sometimes provoke Yoder in hopes that he will become violent and provide grist...
...Yoder often gets into such spats with the state. Their mutual animosity became routine in the '90s: every few months, Yoder went to court either because the state wanted to recommit him or because he had sued someone. An ineffective public defender usually represented him, and the same couple of state doctors testified against him. (Yoder couldn't afford his own lawyers and experts.) The same two or three judges overseeing his commitment trials would also toss out many of his lawsuits, even those complaining about his treatment at Chester...
...commitment trials, Yoder only once had an aggressive private attorney, Edward Unsell of suburban St. Louis, Mo. Unsell called clinical psychologist Michael Armour to the stand in 1993. A supervisor at the big state hospital in St. Louis, Armour had been a witness for the state the year before, but he had changed his mind about Yoder when he actually spoke with him the following year. (His previous testimony had been based only on a review of Yoder's file.) "I had testified against him... and yet he was very appropriate in his dealings with me," Armour said in court...
Nonetheless, the jury sent Yoder back to Chester. Cuneo, the state psychologist, had testified that Yoder was bipolar and delusional and that he had a history of violence. Given a choice between two competing experts, the jury played it safe. Who wants to be responsible for loosing a madman? Yoder repeatedly faced this conundrum in court--convincing jurors he was sane from inside an asylum. The state had a strong case: jurors heard about Yoder's battery of women. They heard about the time he got into a scuffle with a guard and bit him. They heard about incidents when...
After a while, Yoder all but gave up on the courts--and then got creative. A decade earlier, he had been transferred out of Chester to federal custody to be prosecuted for sending threatening mail. So now he tried the same tactic. He says the letters weren't sincere and were intended only to get him sent to federal prison. That strategy may seem silly--or nuts--but a Chester psychologist wrote a report in 1993, before most of the letters were sent, that clearly outlined what Yoder expected from the letters and the consequent trip to federal prison...