By Amber Zegers
UCR Class of 2015
Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced to 957 years of imprisonment, and no, that is not a typo. What has a person done to receive approximately 16 times life imprisonment, you ask? Well, Dahmer strangled seventeen young males and subsequently cut them open in order to have intercourse with their exposed body parts. After this, he would boil their skulls in acid and paint them in order to make a shrine that he believed would give him “special powers”.
He explained that he wanted his victims to come alive in him, and felt that eating some of their body parts would fulfill this desire. As if that was not enough, he tried to make some of his victims sex slaves by drilling holes in their skulls and injecting a special kind of acid, of which some died instantly. Crazy, right? Wrong. It was argued that Dahmer was well in control of his actions and any mental disorders that he had did not diminish his responsibility.
Controversially, he was diagnosed with several paraphilias (including necrophilia), borderline personality disorder, and alcohol problems. Was Dahmer really able to control his actions even though he was suffering from several mental problems? If that was the case, should he have been protected from the law and given treatment instead of imprisonment? How does psychology interact with the law? On November 20th, Frans Koenraadt explained this in his lecture on forensic psychiatry at UCR.
Forensic psychiatry is about assessing whether a person in a pre-trial stage was under the influence of a mental disorder whilst committing the crime that he is tried for: did the person know what he was doing, and if he knew, did he know that what he was doing was bad? If this is the case, we might speak of diminished responsibility and the person in question might be found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity (NGRI).
This assessment, as Dr. Koenraadt explained, is retrospective, prospective, but also looks at the mental state of the person at present (i.e. during the assessment). If a mental disorder is present, it is important to distinguish whether this disorder influenced the criminal act or whether the disorder was caused by the impact of committing the crime. Both have different consequences in court.
Another important part of the assessment is looking at the risk of recidivism (the chance of recommitting a crime), which is prospective in nature: a low risk might result in a lower prison or treatment sentence, whereas a high risk is most likely to involve a high Dutch TBS (essentially: life) sentence.
To continue on this last point, some people may think that it is better for criminals in trial to try for NGRI because it will diminish the severity of the final sentence: it does not. In fact, the reason why a lot of convicted criminals do not cooperate with psychological assessment (which they can rightfully do) is because a prison sentence is definite (for example 10 years with probation), whilst a treatment sentence (for example the Dutch TBS sentence) is not as finite and can be prolonged.
The legal and psychological paradigms related to this field of study differ fundamentally from each other: where lawyers look for the reasons why people commit crimes, psychologists look for the causes of the behavior that is committing the crime. Perhaps this is a difference between determinism (psychology) and the assumption of free will (law), which makes it difficult to merge these professions.
When thinking about forensic psychiatry, the most gruesome cases come to mind. But why do we automatically think that someone must be insane when they commit a very extreme crime? Are we afraid to face the possibility that some people are just bad? Do we need to make a distinction between mad and bad, evil and ill? And what about petty crimes, such as a kleptomaniac not being able to control the urge of stealing things at the Hema? Are these people really unable to control their compulsions? Put on your thinking cap, we are diving into the realm of forensic psychiatry.
Amber Zegers, class of 2015, is a Law and Psychology major from Heerjansdam, The Netherlands.
