Donna MacDonald seemed a heroine the night she saved her adolescent son and Sharon Doloff from a fire in the apartment the three of them shared. The rescue began when MacDonald woke Doloff, informed her of the danger and pulled her from a burning bed. MacDonald then alerted her son to the fire and attempted to put it out.
However, MacDonald dropped a bombshell the following day, when she confessed by affidavit to setting the fire herself, albeit with no intention of harming anyone. Shortly thereafter, MacDonald was indicted for arson.
At trial, the court admitted MacDonald's damning confession into evidence, but sustained the prosecution's objection to the admission of testimony from MacDonald's proposed expert witness, Dr. Donald Devine. Drawing from his experience as a counselor in an in-patient substance abuse program, Dr. Devine opined that MacDonald suffered from a form of posttraumatic stress disorder he called "adult children of alcoholics syndrome." In Dr. Devine's view, this syndrome rendered MacDonald more likely to confess to a crime she did not commit, especially to protect other people about whom she cared.
Convicted and sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment, MacDonald appealed.
Holding: The Supreme Judicial Court of Maine affirmed the conviction but vacated the sentence. Acknowledging that a trial judge may decline to admit an expert's opinion if he finds that it would be neither within the expert's specialized knowledge nor helpful to the jury, the appellate tribunal held that the exclusion of Dr. Devine's testimony was not inappropriate.
As Dr. Devine himself conceded, his diagnosis of adult children of alcoholics syndrome was not recognized by the definitive treatise on psychological diagnoses, the DSM-IV. Moreover, neither he nor other mental health professionals had published any studies supporting his false confession hypothesis. Thus the trial court could reasonably have concluded that Dr. Devine's proffered testimony had little value as scientific knowledge and would do little more than reinforce the layperson's observation that people sometimes lie to protect others close to them.
However, the appellate tribunal remanded the matter for resentencing, ruling that the lower court improperly disregarded MacDonald's life-saving efforts as mitigating factors.
 | Richard J. Frances, M.D. Psychiatrist The Forensic Panel |
Dr. Frances comments: State v. MacDonald raises some very interesting questions relating to addiction, being the child of an addict and personal responsibility. Blaming the drug is an unsuccessful defense. It is therefore not surprising that blaming another's drug use would be unsuccessful.
While there is no specific "adult children of alcoholics syndrome," children of alcoholics have been known to experience a variety of psychiatric problems with greater frequency than other populations. These children tend to bottle up their feelings. They often display a higher degree of denial than others, and they are prone to exhibiting higher levels of depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, antisocial behavior and post-traumatic stress disorder. However, not all children of alcoholics suffer from these problems, and there is no one clinical course that is typical.
"Affliction," the acclaimed movie starring Nick Nolte, depicts a son and his monstrous alcoholic father, brilliantly played by James Coburn. The son's bottled-up emotions explode into self-destructive rage: Any jury would convict him, but the child-of-an-alcoholic issue could sway a judge toward a sentence reduction, especially if the defendant were suffering from one of the above psychiatric conditions.
Although there are no scientific studies that specifically show that adult children of alcoholics may be more likely than others to make a false confession to a crime, it is certainly possible that this dynamic could be at work in a specific case. Being a child of an alcoholic could involve years of mutual cover-up, denial and lying. This might help explain a motive for a particular aspect of behavior. Clinically there are children who have been scapegoated by their alcoholic parents and have been made to take responsibility for problems caused by their parents. It is also true that arson rates are higher among alcoholic patients, many of whom are children of alcoholics.
In any case, it would be very difficult to prove that being the child of an alcoholic resulted in a criminal defendant's false confession, even though it could be a factor in certain circumstances.
Psychiatric Symptoms Found in children of Alcoholics
