Today's New York Times reports that a Texas woman has been granted a mistrial because an expert witness falsely testified that a defendant in a Law and Order episode had used just the insanity defense she used after being portrayed as committing the same crime - drowning her children in the bathtub. This was taken by the prosecutors to argue that the crime was planned and that the defendant was therefore in some legally culpable state of mind at the time of the killing. To quote: "Dr. Lucy Puryear, a psychiatric expert for the defense, was questioned about the nonexistent episode. In an interview yesterday, Dr. Puryear said the questions to her conveyed a powerful impression to jurors. "Had she seen that show and gotten ideas from it," she said, "it would say that she had the ability to think in an abstract way and come up with a plan. That would mean she could tell the difference between right and wrong."
One hardly knows where to start with this case. When the fact that someone could have had a certain -- rather obvious -- thought prior to a crime is taken as evidence that she had that thought, and acted on it, we are deep into wonderland. Of course, we are already down the rabbit hole as soon as we start trying to evaluate degrees of mental competence in people who drown their small children. I can't imagine that anybody's smart enough to sort that out.
But there is one other lesson from this bizarre episode. With courtroom shows, forensic medicine shows, and police procedure shows on television frequently, all of those episodes start being relevant to the state of mind of criminals, of witnesses, and of juries. I remember being questioned during jury selection once, at length, about judges I knew who might have imparted prejudicial legal wisdom. But these shows make specific arguments for the admissibility of certain evidence, for the possibility of certain kinds of falsification -- with the full power of the production industry behind them. It is all extremely prejudicial, and neither judges nor lawyers watch enough television to know what questions to ask.
The same thing is happening with medicine of course. The dramatic space on either side of police and forensic medicine shows is occupied by detailed treatments of bizarre medical conditions. These acquaint viewers with symptoms and possible diagnoses and give them all sorts of medical opinions. This wouldn't be so worrisome if the human body weren't so susceptible to suggestion. If someone thinks he has MS, he will start amplifying every MS-like twinge. The diagnostic problem is to sort through all that to the symptoms that matter.
It's really the same problem with relationships. The range of acceptable, plausible behavior is established on a continuum among the sit-coms, with Friends and Will and Grace as the classic, dependable, middle of the road dramas.
The trouble with all this is just that there is something valuable about being naive, about working it out for oneself. There are insights available to people at one level of sophistication that are closed at another. And there are valuable ways of behaving -- judging on the evidence, saying where it hurts, kissing when you feel like kissing -- that are pretty much foreclosed by sophistication.
There are consequences to letting public media float free, so long as it doesn't display malfunctioning bras. Can the media display some level of public responsibility without resorting to censorship?
Posted by shea0017 at January 7, 2005 11:01 AM