With a gun tucked neatly between his belt and the small of his back, Harry Mitts emerged from the depths of his apartment building and began a shooting spree lasting several hours.
When the first police officer arrived, Mitts fired at him and then retreated into his apartment. As two more officers approached Mitts' apartment, Mitts flung the door open and with a gun in each hand, shot the officers, killing one of them. When the other officer tried to talk Mitts out of his firing rampage, he replied, "The only way you're going to end this is if you kill me ... do your job and you have to kill me." Mitts told the officer that he had been drinking bourbon and said "I shot a couple of cops and killed a fucking nigger"
Into the night, more officers were called and Mitts continued to fire at them, until his apartment filled with tear gas.
Mitts was tried for aggravated murder On trial for murder, Mitts proposed that he was too intoxicated at the time of the slayings to form the intent to kill.
Mitts was sentenced to death. On appeal, he raised several contentions. The first contention centered around the trial court disallowing the testimony of Dr. Sonya McKee, a psychiatrist. McKee was asked to contrast a hypothetical man, "B", who hated African-Americans and police officers with hypothetical man "A", supposedly Mitts, who did not. Dr. McKee was not permitted to answer the question.
Mitts' other main contention was that the trial court refused to instruct the jury on voluntary intoxication and inability to form the intent to kill.
Holding: Affirmed. The court stated that McKee's opinion regarding the two hypothetical people was misleading and confusing, referring to the evidentiary rule that misleading evidence is inadmissible. The court also stated that psychiatric testimony is not admissible (when unrelated to the insanity defense) to show that due to intoxication, the defendant lacked the mental capacity to form the intent to kill. Additionally, evidence of intoxication is sufficient to raise a defense only where, if believed, it would support acquittal (citing State v. Hicks, 538 N.E.2d 1030). The court held that there was evidence of intoxication during the shooting, but that the jury could not have reasonably found that he lacked the capacity to form a specific intent to kill.
 | Michael Welner, M.D. Chairman The Forensic Panel |
Dr. Welner comments: It was like a different person. I would never imagine him doing this. Are you kidding? He's the nicest guy I've ever met.
When nice guys murder, a special challenge in the form of irrefutable identification evidence arises for attorneys inclined to present a psychiatric defense.
Defense attorneys benefit from underlining, for jury consideration, how uncharacteristic the attack may have been. "It's crazy that he did a thing like this!" sometimes advances an otherwise dubious diminished capacity defense. How better to soften the jury up to considering psychiatric condition? But someone who functions especially well, with no indication of illness before the attack, cannot meet the requirements of conditions like schizophrenia or bipolar illness, which require a period of symptoms or history for a diagnosis. Are there psychiatric conditions which can medicalize actions and leave few behavioral fingerprints?
With careful investigation, and sophisticated electrophysiological monitoring, the brain's response to conditions that mirror the attack may yield spectacular evidence for abrupt emotional changes—not to mention volcanic rage and violence. This is not epilepsy per se. Epilepsy is generally associated with convulsions, because the uncontrolled electrical charge activates motor fibers in the brain. But the temporal lobe and the amygdala (a small collection of cells within the brain's temporal lobe often implicated in violence), collectively engines of rage, can fire charges that never impact movement—but cause essentially emotional convulsions.
Abnormal electrical discharges, which cannot be faked, make a compelling visual when contrasted with the activity of a normal brain. Lest you consider this obscure, keep in mind researchers have studied the neuroanatomy of violence for decades with this technology. The cost of a high end electroencephalogram, an electrocardiogram for the brain, is a helluva lot less than your expert's retainer.
A prosecutor would do well to consider the old Yiddish proverb: If you want to know what a person is really like, you have to see him b'kos and b'koas (drunk and angry). Alcohol and its disinhibiting effects lift the lid off the urge within. So may a sufficient amount of anger Once the booze wears off, and incarceration kneads the anger into regret, a man's heart is exposed. The easy approach is exhaustive history and life investigation, for the best indicator of future behavior is past behavior. But what do you do when it is truly the first time?
Projective psychological testing is valuable here. The testing's open-answered examinations provide innocuous questions for gathering evidence of the beast within. Aggression, impulsivity, and other incendiary personality elements may be unearthed to enough degree to survive the subjectivity of an opposing expert's perspective.
As a general rule, forensic professionals should maintain a high threshold for a diagnosis—make the defendant earn it. For as much information as can be made to the forensic professional, if she still doesn't find the diagnosis, it's not there. By the same token, the expert should approach every case determined that if she hasn't the diagnostic answer, there are still questions to be asked.
