Disorder in the Court

Well, here's the latest in an endless series of falls off the juridical deep end. According to a news item that appeared the other day, a woman was sent to prison for "throwing her newborn daughter in the trash and telling her then-husband to dispose of the bag, which she said was filled with Thanksgiving leftovers."

Where to begin? Well, first, it strikes me as a bit odd that the "then-husband" didn't seem to notice anything wrong. Well, after all, they had celebrated Thanksgiving dinner just like always. (Can you say "compartmentalization", class?)

But now here's the kicker. The verdict -- life in prison, which seems quite reasonable under the circumstances -- is being appealed on the grounds that this woman suffered from -- according to "expert psychologists" -- something called "depersonalization disorder". Oh, well, that changes everything! If you can attach the term "disorder" to something, no matter how heinous, then that makes it OK. Or, if not OK, then at least excusable. (Clearly, Saddam's sons missed a good bet when we invaded Iraq. They should have stood up and shouted, "Please not to shoot! We are suffering 'violent tyranny disorder'!") In "depersonalization disorder" -- to return to the present case -- it is supposedly "prevalent in women who do not recognize they are pregnant". To which I would say -- no, not recognizing you're pregnant means you either have a very strange body, or you're an idiot. But in any case, once the child is actually born it's a bit of a stretch to then claim that, because the woman didn't realize she was pregnant up to that point, she still suffers from an associated disorder which can be used to excuse criminally insane behavior.

The whole thing sound suspiciously like one of these countless "ailments", or "syndromes", or "addictions", or "disorders", that are constantly being brought into play once someone is under arrest for a serious crime. You never hear of them otherwise. I've seen this approach used for not only murder, but also rape, robbery, political corruption, embezzlement -- even for playing patty-cake with White House interns. Suddenly everyone who is brought up on charges is declared to be "ill", and therefore not guilty -- or, if technically guilty, then certainly not culpable. It resembes nothing so much as the pathologizing of public school kids. They are either all sick, or about to be. There is no such thing any longer as a just plain bad kid. And there are no bad people -- as Leonard Bernstein wrote in the lyrics for "West Side Story", they only suffer from a "social disease" -- or a "disorder", or... etc. I just don't know if this zeal for letting everyone off the moral hook is healthy. It makes it seem as if our laws are just an arbitrary set of rules dreamt up by one group in order to impose its will on another. Actually, many of our laws _are_ like that. But surely we can draw the line at things like murder, can't we? Or maybe not...