A country gone insane ...

I love that email going around about questions sent to the Sydney Olympic website. Examples include: Will I be able to see kangaroos in the street? (USA) Do the camels in Australia have one hump or two? (UK) Can I wear high heels in Australia? (UK) Are there supermarkets in Sydney and is milk available all year round? (Germany) Which direction is North in Australia? (USA) Will I be able to speak English most places I go? (USA). I should have noticed how many of them were from the US. I did notice my American friend didn’t laugh quite as hard when I read out the one about the guy wanting to walk from Perth to Sydney. "Well do you know the distance between New York and Washington" he responded indignantly. I pointed out that a better analogy would be me suggesting I could walk between LA and New York but the rapport had been lost forever.

Despite our many and increasing similarities in politics, law and culture there are still important differences between Australia and the US that a true blue Aussie needs to confront in order to survive here. One of these differences is in language. A visitor to a New York deli will quickly starve unless she learns to ask for to-MAY-toe soup rather than for to-MAH-toe soup. And I mean YOU have to learn. It’s like Paris, they won’t listen carefully and just work it out, they will just stare at you blankly as if you had launched into a round of Swahili. Then they might present you, with a dramatic clatter of plate against counter, with a kosher ox-tongue sandwich … it will be expensive … and don’t forget to tip. What they call the "entrée size" is what we call "the main course" size, which will of course be enough to feed Africa for the rest of the millennium. (Actual conversation transcript - American: "Well if Australians call "appetizers" "entrees", what do you call main courses? Kirsten: "Main courses" American: "Oh right I can see how you could get that")

Oh and don’t go searching for the prawns, oops I mean shrimp, in the spaghetti marinara. Marinara sauce here means just plain to-MAY-to topping maybe with an ‘erb or two. (Tip: anglicize all French pronunciations eg the cathedral not-tra-dahm is pronounced no-der daim, but be sure to drop the "h" from herb you colonial philistine). Another one that really bugs me is that these Northern Hemisphere types use the word "year" when they mean the "academic year" which actually goes from August to May. (Actual conversation transcript: American: "do you guys really call Christmas time 'summer'?"). So when some academic dude asks in August 2000 "Did that happen last year?" they could well mean "Did it happen in May 2000? or "Did it happen in May 1999". Confusion ensues. Australian academic standing drops. Even if we do say "fortnight" and "Autumn" which according to a friend here is "pretentious and positively Shakespearean".

Similar irritating little nuances will confront one trying to practice criminal law over here. In Australia if someone walks around with a domino strapped to his forehead and tells you he is a judge who is going to be reincarnated as a giant flying turtle and rule heaven; or if another spends his spare time talking only in numbers and rolling his own faeces into small balls and arranging them decoratively on his mantelpiece, we would call them "insane" "nuts" or maybe "utterly and completely bonkers". In America the term is "competent to be executed". The people in those particular examples are now referred to as "carkers" "6 feet under" "no longer with us" or "just plain dead".

OK I did lure you in with a Bill Bryson-style excursus on linguistics just for another rant about human rights in the US but this one I think is particularly interesting. The US has had to confront the troubling issue of executing the retarded and mentally ill and they are making a complete mess of it. You may think "who cares if the yanks knock off a few murderous nut bags, good riddance for the rest of us". An American would reply "Huh?", I would reply "Call me hippy-dippy, say I sit around campfires singing kumbaya, but I believe the way we treat the mentally ill and retarded is a true mark of the humanity and compassion of an evolved society". But that’s boring, the really interesting thing is that for once, Americans almost agree with me.

The most famous case in the last decade was Ricky Ray Rector, a retarded man who shot himself after killing two people, causing the equivalent of his own frontal lobotomy. Rector lost all his court appeals and Governor Bill Clinton, who at the time was running for the Democratic nomination for President, flew into Arkansas to personally supervise the execution. At the time many thought this was a ‘Wag the Dog’ type stunt to distract the public from Bill’s political scandals involving Gennifer Flowers and draft dodging. After the execution it was revealed that Rector had set aside the dessert portion of his last meal. He told guards he was saving it for later.

I don’t know if this was the tipping point but since that time opinion poll after poll suggests that up to 86 per cent of Americans just are not comfortable with zapping, gassing, injecting or otherwise executing people who are mentally retarded or seriously mentally ill. Now some states prohibit killing the retarded or mentally ill, some make it a mitigating factor when the jury decides between life imprisonment and execution and other states just take a case by case approach. Not only are the tests different in each place, it is not entirely clear what the reservation about killing the mentally ill stems from. I mean the Americans love their electric chair. One political candidate even proposed speeding things up by replacing it with an electric sofa (would it have little embroidered electric cushions?) It does not seem to be executing the disadvantaged that bothers most people (most people on death row have had terrible lives). Or even the notion that mental illness or damage makes people less responsible for their crimes (some retarded people have the mental age and judgment of small children but this is a country where the death penalty has been proposed for 11-year-olds). But there does seem to be some kind of consensus that if you are so mad or damaged that you don’t really get what the execution is about, it is kind of poor form to kill you. "Not cricket" as some other foreigner here might say.

Now I am not suggesting for a moment that American courts are full of old softies and that evidence of being a tad behind your grade level in reading will get you off the hook … or the electric sofa. In fact it is almost impossible. There are two times when mental illness or damage is particularly relevant. The first is before you stand trial when it must be determined that you are "competent to be tried". A defendant is supposed to be able to know what’s going on around him or her and be able to advise their lawyer - not so much on all the minutiae of tactical strategy, but at least get the gist and assist in their own defence. In reality it’s notoriously difficult to be found incompetent to stand trial. I know of one case where a defendant attempted suicide by slashing his neck and wrists on the morning of his trial. He was sent to ER where they bandaged him, dosed him up on pain killers and bundled him straight off to court. He spent the morning, still suicidal, drifting in and out of consciousness. The judge didn’t even bother to hold a competency hearing, even after a potential juror complained that the defendant was asleep. The Judge thought the defendant looked just fine and assured his lawyer that one could "barely notice the bandages" on his wrist and collar. (Well as long as he looked good).

After conviction and sentence, a mentally ill or damaged person gets another shot at avoiding death (assuming they have a lawyer and the lawyer is willing and able to try it). The test at this stage, whether you are "competent to be executed", revolves around whether you know you are being executed and why. Getting a finding that you are incompetent can be pretty darn tricky. Take the flying turtle guy, Varnall Weeks.

Varnall Weeks

Pretty much everyone who had met or examined Weeks had found him a few sandwiches short of a picnic. The technical description was paranoid schizophrenic, mentally retarded and suffering from serious delusions and hallucinations. But despite the opinions of both the psychologist hired by the defense and the one hired by the prosecution that Weeks was "insane" a judge found him not only competent to be executed but "highly intelligent" with "signs of genius".

How? Reluctant to rely on the technical mumbo jumbo of the experts the judge called Weeks to the witness stand for a chat and discovered he was completely aware of his surroundings and the basis of the hearing: Weeks knew who his lawyers were (although he only told information about his case to another death row inmate whom he considered his real lawyer); he knew who the Judge was and what job he performed (although Weeks stated he was also a judge, and God,and he could kill the presiding judge if he chose to); and he knew he was going to be executed by the state on a particular date (of course he was immediately going to rise again and rule heaven as a giant flying turtle). Then came the statement by Weeks, sitting there with his domino strapped to his head (it’s a bit long but bear with me):

Well, as creation is desired, you got the adults and you got the children. You’ve got two adults, and you’ve got a child. And you’ve got a man on one side and a woman on the other side, and you’ve got the child which would be the one in the center. Okay? But as creation is concerned, it is the child that causes the parents to come together. You see? I haven’t … The child is causing the parents to create, you know, the child. Well, in the creation of God it works to the same way. The parents … the child is the creator of the parents but the parents is to bring forth the child, you see.

The judge also asked, (for some reason) "can you tell me how the word "rifle" or "gun" or "weapon" would be … show me how they would relate to what you just said?"

Weeks replied:

Well in the military we call it a weapon. The … No. I think it’s the other way round. I think it’s a weapon in the court of law. It’s a weapon … but in the military it’s a firearm … or either I may have it crossed up. Either … either one way or the other … [a gun?] ... well that’s ghetto slang. You know, that’s more less slang or something or that nature … so it’s not really recognised as …i t has no honorable respect using that term like nigger, you know. It’s offensive. See what I’m saying?

The judge replies "I understand exactly what you are saying".

I wanted to extract those statements in full because Weeks ability to discuss the different descriptions for guns led the judge to decide he had signs of advanced intelligence, perhaps genius. On the basis of the remarks about creation the judge decided Weeks had philosophical and religious insights that were "remarkable", in fact Weeks was in keeping with some of the philosophical greats and the record of his statements were so thought-provoking they would probably be of interest for years to come.

Am I missing something or were there two insane people in that courtroom? Anyway, having decided Weeks was both seriously mentally disturbed and a philosophical genius of great potential the judge decided there was no reason not to put the future Aristotle to death and Weeks was duly executed.

Horace Kelly

Horace Kelly was the one who talked in numbers and had the collection of his own faeces on his shelf. He thought death row was a vocational school and on completion he would receive not an execution but a framed certificate. Like Varnall Weeks, even the prison doctors thought Horace Kelly was insane. This is pretty remarkable in the US. Prison doctors tend to be a lot like the knight in that Monty Python movie nerds are always quoting: missing an arm? Mere flesh wound. Brain missing due a frontal lobotomy? No problem at all. Like to roll your faeces into balls? Well, we all have hobbies …

So even if the prison doctor thought he was insane how did Kelly fail to be found incompetent? The main factor that seemed to influence the jury was that the state hired a psychologist who testified she played Kelly at tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses). They drew three times, he won twice. There’s a story that goes around about the chicken always appearing at county fairs in Kentucky that can play tic-tac-toe. One day a man told his friend that he had gone to the fair and he had lost to the chicken. His friend gently suggested that perhaps the man wouldn’t want to go spreading that around. The man replied: "Why not? I barely ever play tic-tac-toe, but that chicken, he plays all the time …"

The Maturana Sagarama

With that background you realise how hard it is to be found too incompetent to be executed. But it does happen. In Arizona, Claude Maturana was actually found incompetent to be executed. Like Horace Kelly he suffers from chronic paranoid schizophrenia and he also tends to talk in numbers. Last August he told doctors he was going home soon because he had gone through the "American white flag check of the badge No. 5071.3 and veterans' No. 620." Two months earlier, when asked about his death sentence, Mr. Maturana had told doctors that it meant nothing because of "Rule 11, Margaret 3," that he was an agent for the "Federal F&I" and "Central TBS" and that he was involved with "NATO TOBY" divisions. Mr. Maturana's attorney, Carla G. Ryan told the National Law Journal that Mr Maturana had asked why her office was not hooked up to the electronic device inside his chest that allows him to communicate without a telephone. "I told him I was too broke," she said.

After examination by two psychiatrists Mr Maturana was found to be incompetent for execution by an Arizona judge. He was then sent to a mental hospital to be made competent. That’s right, he was sent off to a hospital to get better so he would be well enough to kill. This is not unheard of here - the youngest person to be executed in the US since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Charles Rimbaugh, actually tried to kill himself during a competency hearing by rushing at an armed guard. After being shot, Rimbaugh was rushed to the hospital where heroic measures were taken to save his life. Health restored, Rimbaugh got to make history by being executed at 22 years of age.

But the doctors at the Arizona State medical hospital were not crazy about the idea, (OK, bad choice of words). The docs treated Maturana so he was not considered a danger to himself or others but they drew the line at curing him only so he could be executed – they felt that was a breach of their hippocratic oath "to do no harm". One likened it to "fattening a calf for slaughter" After toying with the idea of suing the entire state hospital for contempt of court, Arizona authorities initiated a state wide search to find a doctor, or even a nurse practitioner, willing to "treat" Maturana into the electric chair. State authorities sent 2000 letters to every doctor and nurse practitioner in Arizona. No luck.

The state wide search then turned into a nation wide man hunt … well doctor hunt. Finally, in the entire United States, one doctor was found who was willing to do the job: the medical director of a company that provides mental health care to inmates in Georgia's prisons. Dr Nelson C. Bennet reported that he did not need to treat Mr Maturana. He found the prisoner was seriously ill but he was competent for execution.

Now Dr Bennett was not actually trained in the US, nor in Europe, and there are a few question marks of an ethical nature hanging over this guy’s past. But the authorities did not mind, they want Maturana treated and killed, fast. The doctors of Arizona did mind. It was pointed out that if Dr Bennett wanted to treat Mr Maturana he would need to be licensed by the state of Arizona’s medical board. The Board isn’t too keen to let Bennett join their ranks for the unique Kevorkianate task of killing a patient. Furthermore, the AMA ethical policy specifically forbids treating a prisoner to restore mental competency unless the prisoner's sentence has already been commuted to life. The situation is now at an impasse and all sides are calling on the legislature to make sure this won’t happen again. Meanwhile, as all eyes are turned towards Arizona to see how the situation is resolved, another condemned man deemed incompetent is on his way to the state hospital with instructions to treat him until he is healthy enough to be killed.

The Arizona authorities may seem a bit blood thirsty but in their partial defense they do not actually believe that Maturana is actually mentally ill, they think he is faking it. This might be a bit unlikely given he has been diagnosed as seriously ill by so many doctors, even Dr Bennett, but authorities are wary of the mentally ill claim because it has become so common. One prosecutor in the Maturana case called it "the excuse of the month". This is not to say that the "excuse" actually succeeds on a regular basis but applications alleging mental illness or damage are constantly being made and the authorities are tired of reading the claims (and paying for the expert opinions). They are taking a stand with Maturana because they feel if he succeeds it could be the tip of the iceberg (with a slippery slope heading down to floodgates).

The thing is that these positions are not mutually exclusive. The excuse may be so prevalent because they are so many people on death row with serious mental damage or illness. This accords with common sense given that most sane people do not commit the kind of crimes these people are accused of. It also accords with a growing body of evidence. In one revealing study by two psychiatrists 15 death row inmates were examined. They were chosen not by any common traits but because they were those closest to being executed. The study discovered that ALL of them showed symptoms of serious mental injury or illness including delusions, memory loss and regular bouts of unconsciousness. They all also had a history of serious head injuries - not little bumps but being hit on the head by a horse kick, or a car, or an iron bar, or smashed against a wall, most more than once. Some had histories of head injuries like Homer Simpson’s. The inmates were not making it up, proof existed in medical histories, and in scars. But very few inmates had raised their mental issues at trial. Despite the perception of malingering, many serious sufferers of mental illness tell few people about their symptoms. Some like the Unabomber Ted Koconski, actively disguise their symptoms in order that people might think they are sane.

Rampage Killers

Another interesting study was recently conducted by the New York Times on rampage killers. Rampage killings are actually incredibly rare but after the Columbine shootings they have attracted an enormous amount of publicity and prompted various law enforcement proposals. The Times looked at 102 killers in 100 rampage attacks in a computer-assisted study looking back more than 50 years. The Times stated "425 people were killed and 510 people were injured in the attacks. The database, which primarily focused on cases in the last decade, is believed to be the largest ever compiled on this phenomenon in the United States." The results of the study are so fascinating they deserve separate treatment but some of the findings stand out in this discussion. The study discovered that the biggest link between the killers was not interest in violent video games or movies or dabbling in satanic cults but … you guessed it - mental illness.

More than half had histories of serious mental health problems - either a hospitalisation, a prescription for psychiatric drugs, a suicide attempt or evidence of psychosis. Many of the rest showed symptoms of mental illness before the killings. Now I am not suggesting that people with mental illness are all potential rampage killers. In fact, even people with very serious mental illness are usually no more dangerous than anyone else provided that they take medication and/or receive treatment. The tragedy in these cases was that the people had either stopped medication or treatment or had gone untreated despite constant warning signs. The two biggest trigger events were found to be the end of a relationship or being terminated from employment. These people didn’t just get fired, "snap" and "go postal". Many of them got fired because they were displaying erratic behavior as a symptom of mental illness One might assume similar problems contributed to some of them being dumped.

Conclusion - what can be done?

Obviously the studies of the 15 inmates or the rampage killers do not represent conclusive proof that most death row inmates are mentally ill or damaged. The subjects represent a tiny fraction of convicted murderers. But the studies raise so many important questions. If an almost random sample of 15 inmates finds that all are mentally damaged how many are really out there? Is there a link between head injuries and the commission of violent crime? Are most killers driven by mental forces we don’t properly understand? Could rampages have been prevented by identification of mental illness or by better treatment?

These questions are important and they suggest society has a responsibility to find out more about the reasons why people commit crime. Public safety could be improved if more effort was taken to understand the dimensions of mental illness and damage. Instead courts and prosecutors seem determined to dodge the tricky issues, dump all blame on the defendant, label the mentally ill as malingerers and execute them as quickly as possible.

Some changes seem obvious. Lisa Duy, 24, went to a gun store, bought a semi-automatic pistol, was taught how to shoot it by the gun store owner in the basement, walked out wearing the protective ear mufflers she has been lent and less than two hours later, still wearing the mufflers, opened fire at a TV station. She had a long history of psychiatric problems, was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and only a year before had been committed to a mental hospital by a judge after threatening to kill an FBI Agent.

Does the bit about buying the gun stick out to anyone else? There is a debate right now about whether background checks for gun buyers can access mental health records. The mental health lobby has curiously joined forces with the NRA - arguing about privacy rights and the stigma already attached to people with mental illness. I understand the danger of stigma - especially when it is facing insane people on death row - but I am pretty indifferent to the rights of anyone to buy semi-automatic weapons. It is much harder to go on a murderous rampage with a knife - the recent increase in rampage killings has coincided with easier access to semi-automatic "spray and pray" weapons.

But then that is the US: the state allows the mentally ill to purchase guns to reduce stigma and then kills the mentally ill when they use them, to demonstrate killing is unacceptable - provided the mentally ill can discuss guns which proves that they are a genius. The problem all stems from the same fundamental ignorance about mental illness (and guns) but the US authorities resist finding out more in favor of quick, and brutal, solutions. Perhaps they should just propose that all those with head injuries or mental illness be killed at birth - preventative policing meets zero tolerance. But then what do you expect? It is hard to advocate better understanding and treatment of mental illness in a country where the law makers and judges show the biggest sign of insanity. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.