The devil made them do it

When a half-dozen or so Ivy League psychiatrists lent their expertise to claim "scientifically" that reputed mobster Vincent Gigante was suffering from a mental illness--in "cookie-cutter" fashion, one claimed--when he committed serial gangland crimes, no general consensus of psychiatrists appeared to say how arbitrary their colleagues' findings were. In fact, the psychiatric community was not convinced of Gigante's sanity until he came into court in 2003 and admitted that he had been faking insanity for decades to avoid jail time. Even then, there was no public confession of professional malfeasance by the psychiatrists.

With forensic psychiatry, the results are never testable; consequently, in most cases, whoever pays the piper calls the tune, a tune of mystifying, dazzling rhetoric that works to exonerate and free the guilty soul as well as the guilty perpetrators of crimes.

Richard E. Vatz, Associate Psychology Editor of USA Today, is professor of rhetoric and communication, Towson (Md.) University.

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