Post by SoulTrainOz on Jun 21, 2006 22:15:52 GMT -5
During the murder trial of Andrea Yates in 2002, only one of a dozen mental health experts who testified concluded that the Houston mom was legally sane when she drowned her 5 children in the family bathtub.
That witness, called by prosecutors, was Park Dietz, a renowned forensic psychiatrist. As the prosecutors' only mental health expert, Dietz and his testimony helped convict Yates. The conviction later was overturned. When Yates is retried beginning Thursday, much of the attention again will be on Dietz, who is back on the prosecution's witness list. And now, there are questions about Dietz's conclusions in the Yates case because of his testimony in another trial involving a Texas mother who killed 2 of her children.
Among them: whether Dietz, as Yates' attorneys plan to argue, improperly injected religion into his diagnosis when he concluded that Yates was sane when she killed her children on June 20, 2001.
Such questions have added intrigue to a case in which prosecutors' initial decision to seek the death penalty ignited a national debate over how mental illness and postpartum depression are viewed in criminal courts. The Yates case now has become a symbol of the influence that expert witnesses wield in trials across the USA each day and a test of how psychiatrists' opinions are used in court.
The standards judges use in deciding whether to admit psychiatric opinions in court are less precise than those used to vet testimony about scientific evidence that is more obviously measurable, such as DNA or fingerprints.
In the Yates case, the issue is not whether Dietz qualifies as an expert on psychiatry. His 65-page rsum cites his multiple academic degrees and work as a university professor, practicing psychiatrist and consultant to the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Secret Service. Dietz, 57, has testified usually for the prosecution at hundreds of trials, including those of John Hinckley, who shot President Reagan; "Unabomber" Theodore Kaczynski; and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Dietz was paid $100,000 for his work on the Yates case, he said.
George Parnham, Yates' lead attorney, said the defense hopes to raise doubts about Dietz's analysis of Yates. The defense, Parnham said, will focus particularly on why Dietz found Yates to be sane and therefore legally responsible for her actions and why he came to the opposite conclusion in 2004 in a similar case involving Deanna Laney, a Texas mother who killed 2 of her sons.
Kaylynn Williford, a Harris County prosecutor, said Dietz's analysis in other cases is not relevant to the Yates case. She says she will ask the judge to limit Dietz's testimony to his analysis of Yates. If convicted, Yates could face life in prison, but not execution. That issue was settled at her 1st trial, when the jury rejected execution.
Texas law defines insanity as the inability to know right from wrong. At Yates' trial 4 years ago, Dietz testified that Yates knew that drowning her children was wrong. Jurors agreed with Dietz's opinion and rejected her insanity defense.
2 years after Yates was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, Dietz testified for the prosecution in the murder trial of Laney, a mother from Tyler, Texas, 100 miles east of Dallas. Laney had killed her sons Joshua, 8, and Luke, 6, with a rock and had maimed a 3rd, Aaron, 2.
The similarities between the cases were striking. Laney and Yates, now both 41, were deeply religious, stay-at-home moms when they killed their children. After interviewing them, Dietz found each woman to be mentally ill, psychotic and delusional, according to transcripts from both trials.
However, in Laney's case, Dietz testified she was insane because she had thought attacking her kids was the right thing to do. The jury agreed with Dietz's analysis and acquitted her by reason of insanity. She now is in a mental hospital.
A key difference in the Yates and Laney cases: Laney told Dietz she attacked her sons at God's direction. Dietz testified he took that as a sign she didn't know right from wrong. "I think it's understood that the ultimate test that God could ask of someone is to kill your own child," Dietz testified at the Laney trial. "The Bible has information on that very point."
On the other hand, Yates had told Dietz that she had drowned her children Noah, 7; John, 5; Paul, 3; Luke, 2; and Mary, 6 months at the direction of Satan, according to the trial transcript. She also told Dietz she thought it was wrong.
In an interview with USA TODAY, Dietz recalled why he came to different conclusions about the mental health of Laney and Yates.
"Mrs. Laney expected that her actions would result in her going to heaven, he said. "Mrs. Yates expected she would go to hell for her actions. She told me that. The big thing is that Mrs. Laney did not think what she was doing was wrong. Mrs. Yates did. Mrs. Laney did not see killing the children as a sin. Mrs. Yates did. Mrs. Laney thought God approved of the killing. Mrs. Yates thought God disapproved of the killing. Mrs. Laney did not expect punishment. Mrs. Yates did."
Transcripts from their trials indicate the 2 women told Dietz more about what they were thinking when they killed their kids. Yates told Dietz she was saving them from eternal d**nation, Dietz testified. And at Laney's trial, he testified that Laney "would know it was illegal to kill" her kids.
In the interview, Dietz further explained his views: "Let's assume both of them understand that killing is against the law. Mrs. Laney believed herself to be doing the right thing at God's direction. Mrs. Yates believed herself to be doing the wrong thing, with Satan's prompting, and that it was sinful."
Yates' attorneys say Dietz improperly injected religion into his
diagnosis.
"There's no question," Parnham said. "He's used religious symbols inappropriately."
Michael Perlin, a professor at New York Law School who specializes in mental disability law, said societal values about good and evil should not be factors in determining whether a defendant is sane.
"It shouldn't make any difference where the voices come from, whether God or Satan or a pop star or Napoleon," Perlin said. "If you're responding to voices, that suggests a lack of a grasp on reality. They're responding to an extra-worldly command in a delusional state."
Dietz disagrees. "Under Texas law, if a mentally ill person commits a murder in response to command hallucinations from God, they would surely be insane," he said. "If they did it at the direction of the chief of police, they are arguably insane. If they believed it at the direction of a gang leader, at the direction of Napoleon, at the direction of Satan, they are not insane. Gang leaders, Napoleon and Satan do not have moral authority in Texas.
"The issue is: Does the person believe they are doing the right thing or the wrong thing?"
Enlightenment or confusion
Expert witnesses have been around for centuries.
In what could be called the O.J. Simpson case of its time, barristers defending an English aristocrat accused of murder in 1699 summoned 10 physicians and a seaman to offer opinions about why a drowned body would float.
According to a trial transcript supplied by Seton Hall law professor
Michael Risinger, the experts backed the defense's claim that the victim, a young Quaker woman, had killed herself by leaping into a pond and had not been killed by the defendant. He was cleared.
By 1995, when Simpson was tried on murder charges in Los Angeles, the demand for expert witnesses had created an industry in which some law firms specialize in rounding up such witnesses.
The Simpson case became a battle of experts. In defending Simpson against charges that he had killed his former wife and a waiter, Simpson's legal team assembled a squad of footprint and blood experts to counter every footprint and blood expert called by prosecutors.
Simpson's acquittal led to several academic studies about whether expert witnesses enlighten or confuse juries. By the time of Simpson's trial, federal courts already were beginning to restrict the use of expert witnesses.
In 1993, the Supreme Court set rules for such witnesses amid concerns that false "scientific" evidence, layered with opinion, was being allowed into civil court trials involving product liability, personal injuries and other issues.
The court told federal judges to examine the scientific methods used to support evidence presented by expert witnesses, and to admit only evidence that was scientifically "relevant and reliable." That rule has been adopted by state courts across the nation.
"Before the (1993) decision, I was seeing the most outlandish testimony. People with no credentials offered conclusions without explaining themselves," said Elizabeth Whitaker, a defense lawyer in Dallas who has written about expert witnesses.
The ruling's impact was so sweeping, scholars say, that some civil courts have kept qualified experts from testifying. "At times, it's too rigid a view of what scientists would treat as admissible," said Margaret Berger, a professor at Brooklyn Law School in New York.
The Supreme Court's rule for expert witnesses has had less impact in criminal trials. Most experts in such cases such as DNA and hair follicle analysts and fingerprint technicians are called by prosecutors to testify about obviously measurable evidence. Few defendants are able to mount a Simpson-like challenge to such testimony.
Where standards get murky
As courts have reined in expert testimony, there have been persistent questions about how to apply such standards to experts who deal with mental health and behavioral sciences witnesses who provide courts with evidence that can be particularly difficult to verify.
In death-penalty cases, prosecutors often ask mental health experts to predict whether a convicted killer will be violent in the future. Such demands reflect state laws, such as those in Texas and Virginia, that ask jurors to decide whether a defendant is likely to be "a continuing threat to society."
The American Psychiatric Association has said such predictions are
unreliable. In 2004, the Texas Defender Service concluded in a study of 155 inmates that psychiatrists' predictions about future violence were wrong 95% of the time.
Christopher Slobogin, a University of Florida law professor, says some scholars have pushed to limit testimony of mental health experts to verifiable facts. He says that idea won't fly in courts. "Past mental state is unknowable. That's the basic conundrum," he said. "One possible approach is to prohibit experts from addressing past mental state. But judges and juries want to know what the expert thinks of the facts. They want the facts tied together with a coherent story."
Parnham, Yates' attorney, said that in challenging Dietz's analysis, the defense will have to overcome Dietz's commanding presence in court. "He is charismatic," Parnham said. "He is extremely intelligent. He is able to deliver his opinion to the jury in a concise and logical way."
WHY YATES IS BEING RETRIED
When the Texas Court of Appeals threw out Andrea Yates' conviction last year and set the stage for a retrial, it blamed Park Dietz, the prosecution's mental health expert.
During Yates' trial in 2002, Dietz testified that he believed Yates was legally sane when she drowned her five children the previous year. The jury agreed, found Yates guilty and gave her a life sentence.
It was Dietz's testimony on a separate matter that led the appeals court to overturn Yates' conviction. On the witness stand, Dietz described an episode of the TV drama Law & Order in which a mother with postpartum depression drowned her children and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The episode, Dietz testified, aired just before Yates drowned her children.
In fact, there was no such episode of Law & Order.
Dietz did not testify that the show inspired Yates. But during closing arguments, prosecutors "connected the dots" to suggest the show had done just that, the appeals court said.
A grand jury investigated Dietz and the prosecutors but found no
wrongdoing. Dietz says his testimony about the TV show was "an honest mistake."
(source: USA Today)
That witness, called by prosecutors, was Park Dietz, a renowned forensic psychiatrist. As the prosecutors' only mental health expert, Dietz and his testimony helped convict Yates. The conviction later was overturned. When Yates is retried beginning Thursday, much of the attention again will be on Dietz, who is back on the prosecution's witness list. And now, there are questions about Dietz's conclusions in the Yates case because of his testimony in another trial involving a Texas mother who killed 2 of her children.
Among them: whether Dietz, as Yates' attorneys plan to argue, improperly injected religion into his diagnosis when he concluded that Yates was sane when she killed her children on June 20, 2001.
Such questions have added intrigue to a case in which prosecutors' initial decision to seek the death penalty ignited a national debate over how mental illness and postpartum depression are viewed in criminal courts. The Yates case now has become a symbol of the influence that expert witnesses wield in trials across the USA each day and a test of how psychiatrists' opinions are used in court.
The standards judges use in deciding whether to admit psychiatric opinions in court are less precise than those used to vet testimony about scientific evidence that is more obviously measurable, such as DNA or fingerprints.
In the Yates case, the issue is not whether Dietz qualifies as an expert on psychiatry. His 65-page rsum cites his multiple academic degrees and work as a university professor, practicing psychiatrist and consultant to the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Secret Service. Dietz, 57, has testified usually for the prosecution at hundreds of trials, including those of John Hinckley, who shot President Reagan; "Unabomber" Theodore Kaczynski; and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Dietz was paid $100,000 for his work on the Yates case, he said.
George Parnham, Yates' lead attorney, said the defense hopes to raise doubts about Dietz's analysis of Yates. The defense, Parnham said, will focus particularly on why Dietz found Yates to be sane and therefore legally responsible for her actions and why he came to the opposite conclusion in 2004 in a similar case involving Deanna Laney, a Texas mother who killed 2 of her sons.
Kaylynn Williford, a Harris County prosecutor, said Dietz's analysis in other cases is not relevant to the Yates case. She says she will ask the judge to limit Dietz's testimony to his analysis of Yates. If convicted, Yates could face life in prison, but not execution. That issue was settled at her 1st trial, when the jury rejected execution.
Texas law defines insanity as the inability to know right from wrong. At Yates' trial 4 years ago, Dietz testified that Yates knew that drowning her children was wrong. Jurors agreed with Dietz's opinion and rejected her insanity defense.
2 years after Yates was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, Dietz testified for the prosecution in the murder trial of Laney, a mother from Tyler, Texas, 100 miles east of Dallas. Laney had killed her sons Joshua, 8, and Luke, 6, with a rock and had maimed a 3rd, Aaron, 2.
The similarities between the cases were striking. Laney and Yates, now both 41, were deeply religious, stay-at-home moms when they killed their children. After interviewing them, Dietz found each woman to be mentally ill, psychotic and delusional, according to transcripts from both trials.
However, in Laney's case, Dietz testified she was insane because she had thought attacking her kids was the right thing to do. The jury agreed with Dietz's analysis and acquitted her by reason of insanity. She now is in a mental hospital.
A key difference in the Yates and Laney cases: Laney told Dietz she attacked her sons at God's direction. Dietz testified he took that as a sign she didn't know right from wrong. "I think it's understood that the ultimate test that God could ask of someone is to kill your own child," Dietz testified at the Laney trial. "The Bible has information on that very point."
On the other hand, Yates had told Dietz that she had drowned her children Noah, 7; John, 5; Paul, 3; Luke, 2; and Mary, 6 months at the direction of Satan, according to the trial transcript. She also told Dietz she thought it was wrong.
In an interview with USA TODAY, Dietz recalled why he came to different conclusions about the mental health of Laney and Yates.
"Mrs. Laney expected that her actions would result in her going to heaven, he said. "Mrs. Yates expected she would go to hell for her actions. She told me that. The big thing is that Mrs. Laney did not think what she was doing was wrong. Mrs. Yates did. Mrs. Laney did not see killing the children as a sin. Mrs. Yates did. Mrs. Laney thought God approved of the killing. Mrs. Yates thought God disapproved of the killing. Mrs. Laney did not expect punishment. Mrs. Yates did."
Transcripts from their trials indicate the 2 women told Dietz more about what they were thinking when they killed their kids. Yates told Dietz she was saving them from eternal d**nation, Dietz testified. And at Laney's trial, he testified that Laney "would know it was illegal to kill" her kids.
In the interview, Dietz further explained his views: "Let's assume both of them understand that killing is against the law. Mrs. Laney believed herself to be doing the right thing at God's direction. Mrs. Yates believed herself to be doing the wrong thing, with Satan's prompting, and that it was sinful."
Yates' attorneys say Dietz improperly injected religion into his
diagnosis.
"There's no question," Parnham said. "He's used religious symbols inappropriately."
Michael Perlin, a professor at New York Law School who specializes in mental disability law, said societal values about good and evil should not be factors in determining whether a defendant is sane.
"It shouldn't make any difference where the voices come from, whether God or Satan or a pop star or Napoleon," Perlin said. "If you're responding to voices, that suggests a lack of a grasp on reality. They're responding to an extra-worldly command in a delusional state."
Dietz disagrees. "Under Texas law, if a mentally ill person commits a murder in response to command hallucinations from God, they would surely be insane," he said. "If they did it at the direction of the chief of police, they are arguably insane. If they believed it at the direction of a gang leader, at the direction of Napoleon, at the direction of Satan, they are not insane. Gang leaders, Napoleon and Satan do not have moral authority in Texas.
"The issue is: Does the person believe they are doing the right thing or the wrong thing?"
Enlightenment or confusion
Expert witnesses have been around for centuries.
In what could be called the O.J. Simpson case of its time, barristers defending an English aristocrat accused of murder in 1699 summoned 10 physicians and a seaman to offer opinions about why a drowned body would float.
According to a trial transcript supplied by Seton Hall law professor
Michael Risinger, the experts backed the defense's claim that the victim, a young Quaker woman, had killed herself by leaping into a pond and had not been killed by the defendant. He was cleared.
By 1995, when Simpson was tried on murder charges in Los Angeles, the demand for expert witnesses had created an industry in which some law firms specialize in rounding up such witnesses.
The Simpson case became a battle of experts. In defending Simpson against charges that he had killed his former wife and a waiter, Simpson's legal team assembled a squad of footprint and blood experts to counter every footprint and blood expert called by prosecutors.
Simpson's acquittal led to several academic studies about whether expert witnesses enlighten or confuse juries. By the time of Simpson's trial, federal courts already were beginning to restrict the use of expert witnesses.
In 1993, the Supreme Court set rules for such witnesses amid concerns that false "scientific" evidence, layered with opinion, was being allowed into civil court trials involving product liability, personal injuries and other issues.
The court told federal judges to examine the scientific methods used to support evidence presented by expert witnesses, and to admit only evidence that was scientifically "relevant and reliable." That rule has been adopted by state courts across the nation.
"Before the (1993) decision, I was seeing the most outlandish testimony. People with no credentials offered conclusions without explaining themselves," said Elizabeth Whitaker, a defense lawyer in Dallas who has written about expert witnesses.
The ruling's impact was so sweeping, scholars say, that some civil courts have kept qualified experts from testifying. "At times, it's too rigid a view of what scientists would treat as admissible," said Margaret Berger, a professor at Brooklyn Law School in New York.
The Supreme Court's rule for expert witnesses has had less impact in criminal trials. Most experts in such cases such as DNA and hair follicle analysts and fingerprint technicians are called by prosecutors to testify about obviously measurable evidence. Few defendants are able to mount a Simpson-like challenge to such testimony.
Where standards get murky
As courts have reined in expert testimony, there have been persistent questions about how to apply such standards to experts who deal with mental health and behavioral sciences witnesses who provide courts with evidence that can be particularly difficult to verify.
In death-penalty cases, prosecutors often ask mental health experts to predict whether a convicted killer will be violent in the future. Such demands reflect state laws, such as those in Texas and Virginia, that ask jurors to decide whether a defendant is likely to be "a continuing threat to society."
The American Psychiatric Association has said such predictions are
unreliable. In 2004, the Texas Defender Service concluded in a study of 155 inmates that psychiatrists' predictions about future violence were wrong 95% of the time.
Christopher Slobogin, a University of Florida law professor, says some scholars have pushed to limit testimony of mental health experts to verifiable facts. He says that idea won't fly in courts. "Past mental state is unknowable. That's the basic conundrum," he said. "One possible approach is to prohibit experts from addressing past mental state. But judges and juries want to know what the expert thinks of the facts. They want the facts tied together with a coherent story."
Parnham, Yates' attorney, said that in challenging Dietz's analysis, the defense will have to overcome Dietz's commanding presence in court. "He is charismatic," Parnham said. "He is extremely intelligent. He is able to deliver his opinion to the jury in a concise and logical way."
WHY YATES IS BEING RETRIED
When the Texas Court of Appeals threw out Andrea Yates' conviction last year and set the stage for a retrial, it blamed Park Dietz, the prosecution's mental health expert.
During Yates' trial in 2002, Dietz testified that he believed Yates was legally sane when she drowned her five children the previous year. The jury agreed, found Yates guilty and gave her a life sentence.
It was Dietz's testimony on a separate matter that led the appeals court to overturn Yates' conviction. On the witness stand, Dietz described an episode of the TV drama Law & Order in which a mother with postpartum depression drowned her children and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The episode, Dietz testified, aired just before Yates drowned her children.
In fact, there was no such episode of Law & Order.
Dietz did not testify that the show inspired Yates. But during closing arguments, prosecutors "connected the dots" to suggest the show had done just that, the appeals court said.
A grand jury investigated Dietz and the prosecutors but found no
wrongdoing. Dietz says his testimony about the TV show was "an honest mistake."
(source: USA Today)