THE CONFESSION OF ST PATRICK

The case of the confidential confession: psychiatry.

Potential for False Confession

Recently, an alarmingly high incidence of wrongful convictions has been documented in the United States, in large part because of "Innocence Projects" that use DNA analyses from crime scenes to exonerate innocent persons. The best-known Innocence Project, administered through the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, has helped to free 138 people who had been wrongfully incarcerated. A...

St. Patrick, the organic chemist and Sherlock Holmes meet in the emergency department: a case report.

A 29-year-old male presented to the Royal Alexandra Hospital ED on the evening of St. Patrick’s day in 2001. His presenting complaint was general malaise, and he was well known to the department for a variety of previous mixed ingestions and minor injuries. His history was significant for alcohol abuse, with the last ethanol ingestion approximately 18 hours earlier. He was a disheveled man who ...

A confession of murder: the psychiatrist's dilemma.

Patrick Cavanagh

Patrick Cavanagh graduated in Communications Engineering from McGill University in 1968. An interest in artificial intelligence led to a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Carnegie-Mellon in 1972. He taught at the Université de Montréal in Psychology until 1989, when he moved to Harvard as a Professor of Psychology. Along with Ken Nakayama, he founded the Vision Sciences Laboratory at Harvard i...