In 1954, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia adopted this standard and issued a decision broadening the insanity defense. Psychiatrist Karl Menninger praised this ruling as “more revolutionary in its total effect than the Supreme Court decision regarding segregation.” The court held that an accused is blameless if the crime was “the product of mental disease or mental defect,” which became known as the “Durham Rule.”
The Durham Rule was so broad that few states adopted it. Eighteen years later it was overturned by a Court of Appeals decision which replaced it with another standard for an insanity plea that the “person is not responsible for criminal conduct” if he “lacks substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law.”
The Insanity Defense Reform Act further modified and restricted the use of this defense. The definition of insanity was limited to situations where the accused was “unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts” at the time he carried them out.
But the decades of psychiatric manipulation of the courts were already reflected in a society made more dangerous because criminals had been provided a quick route back — and a route to enhanced insanity through institutional “treatment,” leading to even more serious crimes.
For example, in the late 1970s, Michael Hightower brutally raped two women in Idaho. He was declared not guilty of these crimes by reason of mental illness. Released from a mental institution after less than a year of “treatment,” in 1981 he was arrested for shooting a nurse and convicted of assault with intent to kill. Following the public outcry, the state of Idaho responded and abolished the insanity defense.
The utter inability of psychiatry to predict whether an individual will commit violent acts is acknowledged within the field itself. “We don’t have the means to guarantee society that we will protect them from a person like John Hinckley” said Alan Stone, professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard.
Stone’s conclusions were verified by an extensive investigation involving more than 1,400 studies of the ability of psychiatrists and psychologists to decide whether an individual is sane or prone to violence. David Faust, director of psychology at the Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, and Jay Ziskin, a lawyer, psychologist and authority on expert witnesses, found that “professional clinicians do not in fact make more accurate clinical judgments than laypersons.” They found that “clinicians frequently cannot agree on psychiatric diagnoses of current states, much less provide trustworthy answers to ... more difficult forensic questions.”
Yet, the scheme is set up so psychiatrists are called upon to adjudicate who is sane and who is not. Their perpetration of the insanity defense introduces chaos into the courts.
Take the 1994 case of James Carlson, accused of a series of rapes and burglaries in Arizona during 1990 and 1991. His defense was built on the psychiatric adjudication that he was a schizophrenic with 15 different personalities and that it was one of these “other” personalities who committed the crimes. The Arizona court was so consumed by this psychiatric mumbo-jumbo that at a preliminary hearing in October 1993, the court actually allowed sworn testimony from three of Carlson’s “other” personalities — including that of a teenage lesbian prostitute, in full drag.
It was several days into the trial itself before Carlson blurted out that he made up the entire story of the multiple personalities. He and the psychiatrists might have succeeded in duping the court with this nonsense except for his own admission that, as he put it, “I am a bad liar.”
Unfortunately, psychiatrists have not shared Carlson’s candor. They have repeatedly, and without remorse, championed the cause of turning dangerous criminals loose on society or putting them into their facilities for some “treatment” for which they are handsomely paid before they send them back into society — unreformed and unrepentant — to steal, harm or kill again. Carlson’s admission was damning to himself, but even more so to the psychiatrists who stridently asserted his lack of guilt.
Today, the groundwork for ever more “excusable” crimes and displaced responsibility is nowhere more evident than in the psychiatric bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV). Psychiatrists literally invent labels to create new “mental diseases”; there is nothing scientific about it. Official mental illnesses encompass a vast number of alleged mental maladies which are nothing more than common occurrences in life — a headache, grief after a loss, agitation after an argument — and things which aren’t “wrong” at all. They include “pain disorder” (e.g., those who experience headaches), “attention deficit disorder” (children who fidget), “obsessive-compulsive disorder” (such as people who pray frequently), “sexual aversion disorder,” (those who dislike frequent sex), “feeding disorder” (children who eat junk food), and “developmental arithmetic disorder” (people who get low math scores).
But more significant is the bevy of “illnesses” which serve to “explain” wrongdoing and absolve the doer of responsibility by attributing the acts to “mental problems,” such as “pyromania disorder” (arsonists), “kleptomania disorder” (thieves), and “pedophilia disorder” (child molesters), just for starters. Yet for all the purported illnesses in DSM-IV, both bizarre and outrageous, no cures are ever offered.
Creating False Claims
Psychiatrists have not been content to merely set criminals loose on the public or aggravate their insanity in institutions. They have also reached out to the innocent to make them guilty of wrongdoing in the eyes of courts of law.
With “developments” which include the infamous “repressed memory syndrome” (See “I Just Remembered...”), psychiatrists have made it possible to create claims against people who have no connection to any of the wrongdoing alleged. Given the right “techniques,” psychiatrists have shown that they can create almost any set of facts to hang someone — be it for profit, for fame, or to aid a prosecutor or plaintiff in some personal crusade. Even if judges or juries don’t get duped, the cost in terms of ruined lives can be immeasurable.
A case in point was the highly publicized McMartin pre-school case in Los Angeles, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in history — and one which was created and sustained on psychiatric quackery from day one.
The case started with one child, Malcolm, the son of a woman named Judy Johnson. In September 1983, Johnson claimed that Malcolm had been molested at the pre-school by one of the teachers, Ray Buckey. Buckey was arrested but released the same day for lack of evidence.
But the next day, the Manhattan Beach Police Department sent a bluntly worded form letter to 200 parents of past and present McMartin students, asking them to question their children about sexual abuse at the pre-school. The parents responded and reported no allegations of sexual abuse, but a handful responded that their children had been “acting strangely.” They were referred to Kathleen MacFarlane, a “child abuse therapist” at Children’s Institute International (CII). She began interviewing the children in late 1983 and — using puppets equipped with genitals — came up with alleged sexual abuse in one interview.
Soon word spread, and hundreds of former McMartin students were visiting MacFarlane at CII and coming up with stories of abuse which were never heard of before.
In March 1984, Ray Buckey, his mother, his sister Peggy Ann, his grandmother and pre-school founder Virginia McMartin and three other one-time McMartin teachers were all indicted and arrested on charges of child molestation, including creating child pornography. All but Virginia McMartin were held without bail. The media had a field day, running extensive coverage of the accusations and the parties involved. Much of that attention focused on MacFarlane, who readily provided extensive accounts of what her “therapy” with the children revealed.
But as the trial approached, the evidence against the McMartin defendants, now under scrutiny, began to crumble.
Children who said molestation occurred came forth to say their stories were false. Some told fantasies of bizarre rituals conducted in churches, on windowless airplanes and in non-existent underground tunnels at the pre-school while on the stand.
Prosecution investigators, working with U.S. Customs, the FBI, postal inspectors and local law enforcement were able to uncover no evidence of the pornography alleged. Judy Johnson, the mother who supplied the original investigations, turned out to be so mentally unstable that she complained daily of her son being subjected to continuing molestation by Ray Buckey — while Buckey sat in jail without bail. The videotapes of MacFarlane’s interviews with McMartin pre-school children showed memories of abuse being strongly and repeatedly “suggested” to them, even after the children said over and over that nothing of the sort had occurred. (See “I Just Remembered...”)
It was later alleged that MacFarlane was involved in a sexual relationship with then-ABC reporter Wayne T. Satz, the very reporter providing the most extensive coverage of the case — and many interviews with MacFarlane.
Seven years and two trials later, no defendant was found guilty and most were dismissed voluntarily by the District Attorney’s office. But they had all suffered tremendous damage to their personal and professional lives — damage that all began with the manufactured testimony of child witnesses subjected to a “therapist.”
What Can Be Done
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Eric and Lyle Menendez’s psychiatrists claimed – with no supporting evidence whatsoever – that the murder of their parents was justified due to “abuse” they suffered at their parents’ hands. | |
Permeation of the justice system by psychiatrists and their pseudo-science has brought on a current-day crisis in the courts and in society. The population in psychiatric institutions swells, more dangerous criminals walk the streets, and psychiatrists ceaselessly dream up new ways to condone crime and promote the idea that no one can be responsible. Now is not the time for a “band-aid” solution. Only drastic measures will save the patient.
Even the “mental health” field says that all testimony from psychiatrists, psychologists and the like should be ousted from the courts — along with any evidence relying on their work or testimony. “There is a clear consensus that mental health professionals shouldn’t be giving ultimate opinions — that this person is insane, this custody is in the child’s best interest,” said Gary B. Melton, member of the executive committee of the Law and Psychiatry Society of the American Psychological Association. “I think we should bar experts from giving opinions, for example, on whether someone is likely to be a continuing danger to the community.”
“Studies on the prediction of violence are consistent: clinicians are wrong at least twice as often as they are correct,” added David Faust. Based on this, tossing a coin would bring better results.
But such statements only indicate how deep psychiatry’s poison runs within itself. Psychiatrists calling for the exclusion of psychiatry is significant for what is not said about the flawed product. One wonders how they feel about other aspects of their profession. Perhaps psychiatry deserves this suicidal impulse. But society does not. Nor should the court system go down in a sinking boat.
The covert demolition of the foundations of justice is but one aspect of psychiatry’s effects upon society. As shown in a number of Freedom special reports available to the reader, the rise of violent crime, the promotion of racism and the proliferation of drugs all have psychiatric roots. (See, e.g., The Rise of Senseless Violence in Society: Psychiatry’s Role in the Creation of Crime, a special report from Freedom and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights.) The fact is, psychiatry simply has no place in our courts or any civilized society. The longer psychiatrists are allowed to remain to terrorize the public, the more damage society will suffer.
“What is painfully clear is that psychiatry and its kindred have to be thrown out of the court system at every level. More than a century of inhumanity to man and social destruction is more than enough.” Rose Tinklenberg Executive Director, Citizens Commission on Human Rights |
What must happen is that this fraudulent profession and its phony escapades be recognized for what they are and treated accordingly. They have no place in our court system or anywhere else.
Whether blatantly lying to shelter criminals for a fee, sexually abusing patients or engaging in insurance fraud, psychiatrists, like any other criminals, must be turned over to the authorities for prosecution. Where suspected, they should be reported to law enforcement for investigation.
And what of the counseling or “therapy” formerly furnished by mental health workers to witnesses, victims or the convicted? “Such functions can be much better served by churches,” noted Rose Tinklenberg, executive director of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, an international human rights watchdog organization established by the Church of Scientology in 1969 to expose and abolish psychiatric abuses. “Members of the clergy are far more qualified to do the job, and have no vested interest in making people into patients or abuse cases.”
Some legislation has sought to limit the insanity defense in recent years, and some courts have invalidated similar twisted and destructive theories. But no law or ruling has come close to solving the psychiatric problem. And they should. It requires a total purge of psychiatric poison — in both the judiciary and the society.
“What is painfully clear is that psychiatry and its kindred have to be thrown out of the court system at every level. More than a century of inhumanity to man and social destruction is more than enough,” said Tinklenberg.
