New York Times
April 23, 2002
A
Psychiatrist's-Eye View of Murder and Insanity
By ANASTASIA TOUFEXIS
Psychiatric expert witnesses are fixtures of the criminal justice system these
days, and nowhere more so than in trials involving pleas of insanity to
explain and excuse a crime.
One of the most prominent and provocative experts is Dr. Park Dietz, 53, a
forensic psychiatrist in Newport Beach, Calif. Dr. Dietz has studied more
than 1,000 people whose lawyers are considering insanity pleas, and he has
testified in the trials of high-profile defendants like John W. Hinckley Jr.,
Jeffrey Dahmer and Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who was convicted of murder
after drowning her children.
Dr. Dietz, who was the star prosecution witness in the Yates trial, found it
an especially troubling case, professionally and personally. "It would have
been the easier course of action to distort the law a little, ignore the
evidence a little, and pretend that she didn't know what she did was wrong,"
Dr. Dietz said.
"It was obvious where public opinion lay, it was obvious she was mentally
ill, it was obvious where the professional organizations would like the case
to go, but it would be wrong to distort the law, to stretch the truth and try
to engineer the outcome," he said.
A pioneer in forensic psychiatry, Dr. Dietz, who holds an M.D., a Ph.D. in
sociology and a master's in public health, all from Johns Hopkins, is
credited with elevating the standards of the profession by instituting
rigorous research of homicides, sexual offenses and bizarre actions once
regarded as random occurrences.
He is also credited with forging new ways to look at and protect the
integrity of what he calls the mental evidence. "It's every bit as important
as the standard physical evidence and just as subject to being contaminated
and corrupted," Dr. Dietz said.
He recently discussed his role in the Yates case and his views on the
practice of forensic psychiatry.
Q. What is forensic psychiatry and how is it used?
A. It's traditionally defined as the application of the principles and
practice of psychiatry to matters of law. In the criminal justice system,
forensic psychiatrists and psychologists evaluate whether the accused is
mentally competent to stand trial and, more controversially, to assess a
defendant's state of mind at the time the crime was committed to help the
jury determine whether he or she can be judged legally insane.
Q. How does the law define insanity?
A. Laymen tend to use the word to mean craziness whereas the law uses the
term to refer to a specific set of conditions under which some seriously
mentally ill people are not responsible for otherwise criminal acts. I
emphasize some people; not all seriously mentally ill people who commit
crimes are legally insane at the time.
The set of conditions, known as the legal test, varies from state to state.
Andrea Yates, who was clearly seriously disturbed, was not legally insane in
Texas, where the test is whether the defendant knew that her conduct was
wrong. The weight of the evidence was that she knew it was wrong when she
drowned her children.
But she might be considered insane in some other states with different legal
tests. For instance, I think I would have found her insane in a jurisdiction
where the test is whether she emotionally appreciated the wrongfulness of her
actions. And I certainly would have found her insane in a jurisdiction with
the Durham rule that a defendant is insane if the crime is a product of a
mental disease. But I don't think I would have found her insane under an
irresistible impulse test that considers whether a defendant can control his
or her actions.
Q. Do you believe that justice is served by putting Andrea Yates in prison?
A. You're asking me the "if I were the king" question. If I were the king, I
would have a special set of charges available for mothers who kill their
children, at least those who kill their children in the first year of life,
as England did for many years with the crime of infanticide.
What I would like to see happen in a case such as this one, where the crime
is a product of mental illness and where it's a mother killing her children,
is to have some judicial inquiry as to her accountability or responsibility
where I think the outcome would be as it was here. She has responsibility for
it, but have the disposition of the case be hospitalization and/or supervised
medical care for as long as she remains fertile.
But I'm not the king, and the job of the forensic psychiatrist is to analyze
the evidence, present it as clearly as possible, and stick to the law as it
is, even when the law is one with which I would personally disagree or one
with which I have policy disagreements.
Q. The public tends to think of psychiatric expert witnesses as hired guns
who will say anything. Is there validity to the criticism?
A. There are a few bad apples. But the larger problem is that many forensic
psychiatrists and psychologists carry the clinician role into the courtroom,
and they shouldn't.
I think of forensic psychiatry as analogous to other forensic sciences, and
bringing the use of behavioral techniques to search for the truth about the
behavior underlying events. It isn't a helper role; a defendant is not a
patient.
Still, you find very distinguished representatives of the field talking about
defendants with this clinical spillover of enormous empathy and concern for
their fate that I believe one has to work hard to take out of the equation if
one is in a forensic role. It's a struggle and I have to work at it.
The toughest thing about the Andrea Yates case for me personally was setting
aside the compassion that she naturally evokes as a sick woman who has lost
her children, in order to avoid having my personal biases and prejudices and
feelings impede my objectivity and judgments.
I believe that the proper role of a forensic psychiatrist is to seek the
truth, not to help any party to the case. That's my core philosophical
difference with both clinical psychiatry and the defense bar. And it's one of
the reasons that I appear mostly for the prosecution. One of the conditions I
have for accepting a case is that I have access to all information.
Prosecutors never have a problem with that because their goal is to seek
truth and justice, and all the data are important in that quest.
The defense has a different set of duties. Their duty is to help their
client, and often there are pieces of evidence that are not in their client's
interest to have disclosed or produced. But I welcome nothing more than cases
of true insanity where an innocent man or woman could be otherwise convicted,
and generally I have one or two cases a year where I find the defendant
insane, and then there's usually no trial.
Q. How should a defendant's mental state be evaluated?
A. The current appropriate approach is to compare the specific details of the
case to the legal test. Where you'll find a difference among forensic
psychiatrists and psychologists is in which details they pay attention to,
emphasize or ignore and the methods they use to determine the details.
There are two sources of mental evidence. One is the interviews of the
defendant, which traditionally has been the linchpin of forensic assessments;
the other is all the rest of the behavioral evidence generated by looking at
crime scenes and interviewing witnesses and studying autopsies and weapons.
Q. Are you concerned about how defendants are interviewed?
A. Forensic interviewing requires that one take pains to elicit the truth
rather than create a fiction. Mental health professionals fancy themselves
good interviewers because it's a basic skill of each of the crafts. You would
think it would be common sense not to ask leading questions or engage in
suggestive questioning, but it does not come naturally to any of us.
Natural human techniques for gaining information from an interview
unthinkingly cut corners by suggesting answers or guessing at the answer or
offering multiple choices.
It's because of the common practice of doing this and the serious risks of it
that I analogize that form of interviewing to other ways in which crime
scenes and evidence become contaminated or destroyed. And it puzzles me that
this isn't condemned by either the profession or the courts. Usually
considerable attention is paid to the integrity of evidence.
There's a partial remedy and that is to videotape all contact that mental
health professionals have with the defendant. There was partial videotaping
of interviews with Andrea Yates. Several defense experts interviewed her and
then made a short videotape that rehashed with her what she previously said,
often by the experts' summarizing what she had said and getting her to nod in
agreement. So we don't know to what extent they led her in what she said
earlier, but I saw what I regard as some shocking examples of leading
questions.
Q. Is examining other behavioral evidence a novel approach, and how important
is it in cases?
A. It's a relatively recent approach and began with the Hinckley case in
which I was a member of the prosecution team. Things we did in that case that
were unheard of at the time included visiting the crime scene, visiting the
defendant's home, inspecting the physical evidence, reading the books that
might have influenced him and interviewing a large number of witnesses who
observed or interacted with the defendant.
In Hinckley's bedroom, I found targets that he had saved from the firing
range that showed he was only accurate at close ranges. From the crime scene
at the Hilton, we saw that because of where the limousine was parked and
because of the curvature of the wall, Hinckley had a very brief window where
President Reagan was visible and it was at a significant distance.
By itself, these don't provide insight into his mental state. But when taken
with his account of why he shot when he did, it does. And what it tends to
prove is that it was not an uncontrollable irresistible impulse to fire when
he did. He had resisted an identical impulse when the president was out of
his range; impulses don't come and go according to range, but willful
decisions do.
Hinckley was acquitted, but the method of gathering evidence we pioneered
there has been crucial in other cases. If I had to choose between the
interview only or everything except the interview as a means of getting to
the truth, I'd prefer everything except the interview because it would get me
to the truth more often. Still, the ideal is to have both.
April 30, 2002
Prosecution witness
in Yates trial assailed
By CAROL CHRISTIAN
Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle
Defenders of convicted capital murderer Andrea Pia Yates say recent comments
from the prosecution's star witness suggesting that defense attorneys and
their expert witnesses "distort the law" are inappropriate. SEE IT NOW
Dr. Park Dietz, the California psychiatrist who testified that Yates was
legally sane when she drowned her five children in June, was the subject of
an April 23 article in the New York Times in which he discussed his role in
the Yates case and his views on forensic psychiatry -- the application of
psychiatry to matters of law. Yates, 37, is serving a life sentence in prison
after being convicted March 12. Her defense team had argued she didn't know
her conduct was wrong, making her legally insane in Texas. In the Times
article, Dietz said it was difficult to set aside the compassion he felt for
Yates and remain objective. "It would have been the easier course of action
to distort the law a little, ignore the evidence a little and pretend that
she didn't know what she did was wrong," Dietz said in the article. Dietz --
who has testified or consulted about such high-profile defendants as
Milwaukee serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, would-be presidential assassin John
Hinckley and Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski -- also said the proper role of a
forensic psychiatrist is to seek the truth, not to help any party in the
case. "That's my core philosophical difference with both clinical psychiatry
and the defense bar," he told the Times. "And it's one of the reasons that I
appear mostly for the prosecution." Yates' lawyer, George Parnham, said
Dietz's remarks were a "slam" against the defense lawyers and their expert
witnesses. "Quite honestly, I'm rather astounded that Dr. Dietz would make
these statements in light of the fact that he testified during our case about
the existence of a nonexistent episode of Law & Order," Parnham said. He
referred to Dietz's testimony that before Yates killed her children, she had
watched an episode of the television drama Law & Order in which a woman
drowned her children in the bathtub and was later judged to be insane. There
was no such episode. When this was brought to Dietz's attention, he sent a
letter to prosecutors Joe Owmby and Kaylynn Williford stating that he had
confused other episodes and other actual cases of infanticide. Dietz is a
technical adviser to the show as well as Law & Order Criminal Intent and has
seen nearly 300 episodes of the two programs, he said. Parnham has said
Dietz's inaccurate testimony about Law & Order could be the basis of an
appeal of Yates' conviction. In the Times article, Dietz said he won't accept
a case unless he has access to all information. "Prosecutors never have a
problem with that, because their goal is to seek truth and justice, and all
the data are important in that quest," he said in the question-and-answer
interview. Dr. Lucy Puryear, a Houston psychiatrist who testified for the
defense at Yates' trial, pointed out that the defense was not allowed copies
of various documents, including the police offense report. Parnham was
permitted to read the report but could not photocopy it and had to write
notes about it based on what he could remember, Puryear told the Chronicle.
"I was at a real disadvantage," she said. Puryear, former director of the
Baylor Psychiatry Clinic at Baylor College of Medicine, also took issue with
Dietz's remarks that mental health professionals tend to ask leading
questions and videotape only part of their interviews, as was the case with
Yates. In the Times article, Dietz said he saw some "shocking examples of
leading questions" in interviews videotaped by the defense. Puryear told the
Chronicle that Dietz also asked Yates leading questions. "It's almost
impossible not to," she said, "particularly if you're interviewing someone
with a mental illness. ... You try and help them express what they are
thinking." In Dietz's eight hours of taped interviews with Yates, there were
many instances where the material supported the defense view that she was
insane, said Puryear, who specializes in women's psychiatric problems related
to childbirth. "He edited it and showed the jury portions that supported his
testimony," she said. In contrast, Puryear said, she interviewed Yates for an
hour or two, began taping and showed the entire unedited tape in court. In
the Times article, Dietz said he thought he would have considered Yates
insane in a state where the legal test is whether she "emotionally
appreciated the wrongfulness" of her actions. "And I certainly would have
found her insane in a jurisdiction with the Durham rule that a defendant is
insane if the crime is a product of a mental disease," he said. Puryear said
the differing standards bring up basic questions: What is knowing? What is
wrong? "What he means by `emotionally appreciated the wrongfulness' -- that
is splitting hairs," she said. "It doesn't make any sense to have that kind
of standard." Dietz, however, told the Chronicle that laws are supposed to
reflect popular opinion. "Foolish or not, (legislators) are free to pass laws
reflecting the views of people in a particular state or country," said Dietz,
who has a doctorate in sociology as well as an M.D. and a master's degree in
public health. "Respecting that diversity of laws is essential to functioning
in the court system." Puryear also said she was troubled by Dietz's statement
that the prosecution seeks truth and justice whereas defense attorneys and
clinical psychiatrists want to help the defendant. "I think that's an unfair
and biased approach to a case like this because if you are presuming the
prosecution is the side that's right and the defense is the side that's
biased, your testimony is going to be as prejudicial as he's claiming the
defense testimony is," she said. "To make a statement that the prosecution is
seeking truth and justice is somewhat scandalous," she said. Dietz told the
Chronicle he was not arguing that prosecutors are good and defense lawyers
are bad but that they are part of the U.S. legal system that imposes
different duties on the two sides.
