Law and psychiatry: a stormy marriage.

نویسنده

  • W Bromberg
چکیده

The domestic tranquility of the law and forensic psychiatry has been disturbed recently by an escalated request that psychiatric experts be excluded from court trials. Still, separation of the parties is not imminent and divorce seems unthinkable, although disharmony exists. Disquiet over psychiatric testimony is not new; numerous judicial statements can be found in case law over the years remarking on the immiscibility of the two disciplines. Alexander Brooks in his textbook) puts the situation gently: " ... Extensive incorporation of psychiatric thought and language in a legal standard does not promise to aid legal judgments without at the same time forfeiting important goals of the legal system." Most legal authorities praise the insights psychiatric experts provide, for example in criminal cases, but insist that' 'Those insights must be viewed in the context of a legal rather than a medical judgment. "~Others were more vigorous, A Federal Judge in US v. Pollard,:] after hearing three qualified psychiatrists testify that an offender was in a "dissociative reaction" at the time of a bank robbery, stated that he found "much comfort" in the assistance of mental specialists in sentencing, still remarked, "There are compelling reasons for not blindly following the opinions of experts ... on issues of fact." In the late 1960s, Judge Bazelon rejected the Durham test for criminal irresponsibility because, in part, "The insanity defense was entirely in the hands of the experts, .. That state of affairs pleased no one, .. " In the controversy surrounding the Durham rule, Judge Bazelon made it clear that "Our society has chosen not to give this decision (to testify about the defendant's criminal responsibility) to psychiatrists ... rather to 12 lay representatives of the community," At the same time, he accepted the value of psychiatric testimony in giving "expert" information about the defendant's mental condition.;' Some years before in Wolff. Justice Mosk of the California Supreme Court stated on review of a murder case claiming insanity, 6 " ••• To accept the defendant's thesis would be tantamount to creating by judicial fiat a new defense plea of 'not guilty of schizophrenia.' To do so ... would be bad law and apparently still worse medicine ... " In 1979, the Deputy District Attorney of Sacramento County, Ronald Tochterman, decried the use of psychiatric testimony in the Chase case i in terms which aptly express legal objections: (I) Psychiatrists should not be allowed to state their present diagnosis; (2) they should not be allowed to ante-diagnose a defendant, (3)

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عنوان ژورنال:
  • The Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law

دوره 9 3  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 1981