Insanity defense on trial

Whether or not to plead insanity after you've gone loco on a 5 yr old is one of ye oldest questions since "Did Grendel love his mother?" Why leave it up to your piddling Psychosis 101 training from grade school watchings of "Hotdog... the Movie" when you can hire a lawyer who clearly does not have your well being in mind and should be white-coat hugging himself all the way to Bedlam.

In 1980 Thomas Szasz testified for the prosecution in the trial of Darlin June Cromer, a 34-year-old white woman charged with kidnapping and murdering Reginald Williams, a 5-year-old black boy. Szasz explains why, unlike the defense experts, he did not conduct a “psychiatric examination” of Cromer:

“I regard the practice as the epitome of junk science and refuse to participate in it,” he writes. Not only is there “no objective test for mental illness,” but psychiatrists are supposed to determine a defendant’s state of mind at the time of the crime by talking to him many months later, a pretense Szasz considers “prima facie absurd.”