Faking Insanity: How Experts Tell What's Real |
Faking insanity is real. So is branding a genuinely insane person a liar.
You can be genuinely ill and still exaggerate.
Being clearly psychotic isn't enough to win. There must be a link between the symptoms and the crime.
On October 30, 2012, in Naperville, Illinois, 40-year-old Elzbieta Plackowska stabbed her 7-year-old son and a 5-year-old girl she was babysitting. She told evaluators she had been hearing voices. The psychiatrist retained by her defense concluded she was in the grip of a manic episode and could not appreciate that what she had done was wrong.
The psychiatrist called by the prosecution wasn’t buying it. Her story kept shifting. She said the children had seen the same visions she did, but real hallucinations don’t work that way. And the voices, she said, had spoken to her in English, though her first language was Polish. After a bench trial in 2017, the judge sided with the prosecution and convicted her.
Two forensic psychiatrists examined the same woman and reached opposite conclusions about whether she was lying. Cases like this turn on one of the hardest judgments in forensic work: whether a defendant who claims to be mentally ill is telling the truth. The fear of being fooled by a faker is real. The opposite mistake is just as costly: branding a sick person a liar. The error cuts both ways.
It Looks Like an Easy Out. It Rarely Is.
Ask the average juror, and you will hear that the insanity defense is a common loophole, easy to fake, and used all the time to dodge punishment. Decades of research say otherwise: Insanity pleas are rare, seldom succeed, and usually end in long psychiatric confinement, not release.
But the fear that a dangerous person will be set free to run amok in the community........