Date: Thu, 10 Nov 1994 18:30:34 -0500 From: Quinn D Rossander To: Multiple recipients of list MADNESS THE INSANITY DEFENSE: PSYCHIATRY'S WILD KINGDOM A gross miscarriage of justice occurred in the recent insanity "acquittal" of David R. Peterson, the now three-time insanity acquittee who brutally stabbed nine-year old Jessica Short in Middletown last July. Tragically, few people are protesting this most flagrant psychiatric atrocity. There was no real trial. The prosecution did not prosecute; the defense did not defend; and the judges did not judge. Instead, all the parties involved conspired to declare Peterson insane and dispatch him to Whiting (a maximum security loony-bin). In so doing, they further dehumanized all persons who have ever been labelled "mentally ill." In his keynote speech to the 1988 conference of the National Association of Rights, Protection, and Advocacy, heretical psychiatrist Thomas Szasz stated that he has "stood firmly for the policy of viewing so-called mental patients as persons....who ought to be treated by the law with the same disregard for their psychiatric status as they are for their religious status." In viewing psychiatric survivors and inmates as persons, Szasz is a lone voice in the wilderness. Most people, specially those involved in the Peterson show trial, believe that "mental patients" are subhuman. After the verdict was read, Christopher James, Peterson's "public defender," told reporters, "I suppose if you have a zoo and you have a maneating tiger, and you let the tiger out, [can] you blame the tiger?" Here we have it. Those accused of "mental illness" are predatory wild animals, like one would see on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. Psychiatrists are expected to shoot the animals with tranquilizer dart guns full of brain-damaging neuroleptics and ship them to psychiatric zoos disguised as hospitals, to be tamed and perhaps used for experimentation and research. To attribute free will and responsibility to such beasts would be an absurdity. In a similar vein, _Hartford Courant_ columnist Tom Condon asks, "Why is there a full, formal criminal trial for this man who was in the hospital in the first place because he'd been judged insane?" Apparently Condon also believes that Peterson is an animal undeserving of human rights, who should be dispatched to Whiting in the same inquisitorial manner that Jews and "witches" were burned at the stake five centuries ago, or that Soviet dissidents were (and still are) locked up in the psychiatric Gulag. This denial of the very humanity of psychiatric survivors and inmates is not new. Before the Civil War, the legal fiction that black people were only three-fifths human was enshrined in the Constitution. Slaves were viewed as animals to be tamed and Christianized by their ostensibly benevolent masters. Similarly in 1920, German psychiatrist Alfred Hoche co-authored _The Destruction Of Life Devoid Of Value_, calling psychiatric inmates "the mentally dead" and "partial" Germans. This began the "hygienic extermination, first of psychiatric inmates, then people with disabilities, and ultimately Jews (whom Hitler called "vermin") and other "non-Aryans." Thus, the real goal of the insanity defense is NOT to show compassion for the offender. Indeed, on average, insanity acquittees are locked up far longer and treated far more savagely -- with brain damaging "treatments" -- than had they ben convicted of their crimes. Rather, the real purpose of the insanity defense is to do to a guilty person what involuntary commitment does to an innocent person, namely to cast him or her out of the human community. by Stephen Mendelsohn This file came from anonymous ftp sjuvm.stjohns.edu cd MADNESS The MADNESS ftp site is a service of MADNESS, an online discussion on LISTSERV@sjuvm.stjohns.edu Please credit the list if you copy this file.