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  • Responsibility of the Psychopath
  • Ralph Slovenko (bio)

Piers Benn’s paper is yet another exercise over the meaning of psychopathy (or sociopathy as it is sometimes called). “A pressing psychiatric issue,” he says, “turns on the proper classification of the condition.” He contrasts a variety of “normal” wrongdoers with psychopaths, and he suggests that psychopaths are often seriously deficient in their capacity for meaningful human relations, and that explains their callousness and their imprudence. Given that incapacity, he wonders whether they can be described in moral terms, and that raises the question of responsibility. He has theoretical difficulty holding them accountable and concludes with no answer to the question of how they should be dealt with.

On the issue of criminal responsibility (not guilty by reason of insanity), the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in McDonald v. United States in 1962 suggested, because of the vagaries of psychiatric diagnosis, a legal definition of “mental disease or defect.” It was unwilling to leave the definition to psychiatry only. It said:1

Our purpose now is to make it very clear that neither the court nor the jury is bound by ad hoc definitions or conclusions as to what experts state is a disease or defect. What psychiatrists may consider a “mental disease or defect” for clinical purposes, where their concern is treatment, may or may not be the same as mental disease or defect for the jury’s purpose in determining criminal responsibility. Consequently, for that purpose the jury should be told that a mental disease or defect includes any abnormal condition of the mind which substantially affects mental or emotional process and substantially impairs behavior controls. Thus the jury would consider testimony concerning the development, adaptation and functioning of these processes and controls.

Years later, also in the District of Columbia, in United States v. Hinckley,2 the trial judge instructed the jury as follows:

You have heard the evidence of psychiatrists and a psychologist who testified as [expert witnesses]. An expert in a particular field, as I indicated, is permitted to give his opinion in evidence, and in this connection you are instructed that you are not bound by medical labels, definitions, or conclusions as to what is or is not a mental disease or defect. What psychiatrists and psychologists may or may not consider a mental disease or defect for clinical purposes where their concern is treatment may or may not be the same as mental disease or defect for the purposes of determining criminal responsibility. Whether the defendant had a mental disease or defect must be determined by you under the explanation of those terms as it was given to you by the Court.

The test for non-responsibility that was recommended in 1955 by the American Law Institute and widely adopted (the test was used in the Hinckley case) provides that:

A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality (wrongfulness) of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law. [End Page 53]

Because of the vagaries of expert testimony on sociopathy, the next sentence of the ALI test provides that repeated criminal or anti-social conduct does not of itself demonstrate mental illness. The formulation is designed to keep the sociopath (or as otherwise called, the psychopath) within the scope of criminal responsibility.

The American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-I listed sociopathic personality as a mental illness, but mental hospital superintendents were concerned that sociopathic criminals would be found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to hospitals instead of prison. In a decision made at a staff meeting in 1954, St. Elizabeths Hospital in the District of Columbia decided that sociopathy would not be regarded as mental illness. Three years later, shortly after the trial of one Comer Blocker, the superintendent of St. Elizabeths, Dr. Wired Overholser and another doctor on the staff, in an administrative decision, decided that, thereafter, sociopathic personality disturbance would be classified as a mental illness. It was not regarded as such at St. Elizabeths at the time of Blocker’s...

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