Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Theodore Kaczynski should be in a mental hospital. Instead, he's about to become the star in a grotesque courtroom circus.
Jan 15, 1998 | Accused Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, who's been described by his defense lawyers as a paranoid schizophrenic, is this week being tested by a court-appointed psychiatrist to determine whether he is competent to stand trial and to act as his own attorney, as Kaczynski has requested. Unless the Justice Department -- which has reopened negotiations on the subject -- agrees to a plea bargain, most observers believe that the trial will eventually proceed, with an evidently mentally ill defendant in the spotlight.
What is the standard for "competency"? How could Kaczynski, who has already tried to commit suicide in prison, be judged able to act as his own attorney? And if the trial proceeds, what is likely to happen? Salon spoke with Mark Levy, M.D., assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco, who often acts as a forensic consultant in competency cases.
What is "competence" in the legal sense?
It's basically the ability to understand the court proceedings, to work within the context of the proceedings and function reasonably -- these are loose terms -- and to work with one's attorney in mounting a reasonable defense. You can't say, well, I'll work with my attorney as long as he argues that the Martians are invading. That's not a reasonable defense. That's part of the issue to be evaluated with Kaczynski ...
It's not enough to be diagnosed as mentally ill?
No. There's three concepts that need to be differentiated in a legal context. One is "psychosis" which is a medical term; one is "insanity" which is a medical/legal term, and comes into play when determining a person's guilt or innocence; and the third is "competence" which is an entirely legal term. In the legal context, for example, you can be a psychotic but sane; you can also be psychotic but competent to stand trial.
How does a court-appointed psychiatrist go about determining a person's competence?
The first thing you do is to try and make an accurate diagnosis, which in Kaczynski's case would mean determining whether the preliminary evaluation that was done of Kaczynski by the defense psychiatrist and psychologist -- that this man is a paranoid schizophrenic -- is correct.
How do you do that?
Through interviews, a look at his written material and, ideally -- and if he's forced to cooperate -- a battery of psychological tests. With paranoid schizophrenia, the tests look for characteristic mental deficits, like difficulty with abstraction. Schizophrenics are concrete in their thinking. You'd find that when you say to him, "Mr. Kaczynski, when you hear the proverb, 'a rolling stone gathers no moss'" -- despite his high IQ, he may say, "Well, it's like if you roll a stone on the ground you won't get moss." A failure to abstract. Now he may be smart enough to get that one, but someplace along the line, relative to his intellect, you'd find a surprising amount of concreteness to his thinking.
Another indicator may be delusions, which in Kaczynski's case I think they'll find.
How do you test for delusions?
The Rorschach Test, the ink-blot test. As long as a paranoid schizophrenic can systematize, he can keep his thinking relatively organized. If you say, "When were you born, where were you born, what was your mother's maiden name" and ask very specific questions, someone like Kaczynski will perform well. However, if you give them an unstructured environment, like the Rorschach, they fall apart. If you say, "What do you see in this ink-blot?" a healthy person will say, "It's a butterfly," or this or that response that's within a wide array of things that are correlated to healthy people. A schizophrenic will give you more and more bizarre responses: "Well there's a gun, and in the gun there's an amoeba and the gun is in the mouth of a woman ..." You also see that their anxiety rises. If you ask them open-ended questions, they'll get very anxious.
Like, "Tell me about yourself ..."?
"Tell me about yourself," "tell me about your feelings in a winter's night in your cabin ..." Because then they'll be flooded by unconscious or partially conscious impulses that they're terrified of and they don't have the defense mechanisms with which to bind.
Get Salon in your mailbox!