Category: Crime

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War on Drugs

I am against drug abuse on a deeply personal level, but I am against drug prohibition on every level, personal and political. But it doesn’t matter that I am or that The Wire reflects this, because our political culture cannot and will not produce the selfless courage necessary for a political leader to address the problem honestly. Our political culture only produces politicians and it serves only the relentless ambition of those willing to tell us what we think we want to hear. David Simon, Co-creator of “The Wire”.

Was a war ever fought, for so long, and with such poor results, as the war on drugs?

It was started over 40 years ago by Richard Nixon, as part of his law and order campaign, a successful appeal to middle America, in the belief that more resources and money and manpower could eliminate the scourge of drug addictions. In fact the opposite has happened: drug smuggling, sales, and use are more pervasive than ever before. The initial reduction in the amount of drugs entering the country resulted in increased prices which resulted in increased imports, more dealers, more runners, more robbery and murder, and more addiction. The war on drugs was a compete failure.

Now, in a normal situation, people might look at a program, at it’s goals and methods, and it’s expectations, and decide whether or not it was a success. And if it was a failure, they would abandon that program and try something else.

But the thing about drugs is that America can always imagine that it could be worse. It’s not easy to analyze the drug problem from the point of view of what the untold billions of dollars the war on drugs is costing America could do if they had been spent on treatment instead of interdiction.

As Simon observes, there is almost no politician with the guts to admit that the war on drugs is a complete failure even though, by any reasonable measure, it obviously is. Except, perhaps, for Ron Paul, who has more or less declared that if anyone wants to destroy himself with drugs, why should the government get in the way?

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Hysterical Frigid Puritans

Todd Hoffner was a very successful football coach at Minnesota State Mankato. They gave him a cell phone, a Blackberry.

One day, his children, girls aged 4 and 9, and boy 8, came downstairs in towels fresh from a bubble bath (which they had taken together), and demanded he record their performance with his video camera. The towels came off and they danced and played as young children do.

There are actually people in this world who think that children this age running around naked, dancing, and playing, is deviant in some way. I can’t tell you just how sick I think these people are. But I think these people gravitate towards positions of authority: they really think they need to run other peoples’ lives, make decisions for them, and ruin them, if necessary, to further their own egocentric power lusts.

When Todd Hoffner’s cell phone broke, he took it in to the IT Department at Mankato and asked them to recover any photos and videos from it before replacing it. This they did. When some anonymous tiny little smidgeon of an IT technician saw the video, he freaked and called the afore-mentioned authorities, who called the police. Hoffner was escorted off the field in the middle of a practice. He was arrested and charged with making child porn.

Not everybody out there is crazy. Though the prosecutor and the University were absolutely determined to save our society from this terrifying threat to public morality, a judge quickly threw the case out. Sometimes you are more amazed at good sense than at hysteria. I am amazed. She saw exactly what I think any rational person would see: young, innocent children playing, naked. There was nothing pornographic about the videos at all.

The police seized Hoffner’s computers at home and found nothing.

Todd Hoffner’s wife, not surprisingly, ridiculed the charges. After all, it was she who put the kids in the tub together in the first place, naked. She believes the children have a healthy, natural, playful attitude towards their bodies. Many intelligent people believe that.

Hoffner, in an interview with ESPN said this: “You make a simple mistake and it turns your life upside down”. He’s wrong: he didn’t make a mistake. There was not a thing wrong with what he did.

The University human resources department appears to be terrified. They don’t act terrified in public– well, yes they do: they have drawn over themselves a cloak of secrecy. They suspended Hoffner for using the company phone to take personal pictures (no word on the results of their investigations into all of their other staff to see just how many of them have also broken this rule– I’ll bet some HR staff themselves have broken it). Then they fired him for unstated reasons.

I believe they don’t have any reason to fire him except for this: they look like complete idiots. They look like unspeakably stupid hysterical barbaric irrational zealots. And they know it. There is only one way they think they can rescue their reputations: by pretending that they found something else.

And thus, on an NPR site, in the comments, someone says, explaining why they fired Hoffner after a judge found him innocent, “they must have something else: do you think they are stupid?”

Yes, I do.  Oh yes I do!  More than ever.

Afterthought

With all the DNA testing going on and the resultant exonerations of people who have served, in some cases, ten, fifteen, twenty years in prison (and sometimes on death row), it is not unusual to see a DA hunker down and insist, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the man is guilty, guilty, guilty!

Like the University of Mankato HR staff, they refuse to take responsibility for the massive damage they have done to an innocent man. It’s human nature. It’s a part of human nature that often does more damage than any other trait, because many of these people will stomp over anything and anyone to try to prove that they didn’t recklessly destroy a man’s life on the basis of evidence that any intelligent person could have read differently.

And More on the Assholes at Minnesota State University

Minnesota State destroyed notes from its controversial investigation of Hoffner, and the Minnesota legislative auditor’s office meanwhile said it was “surprised” that the school’s investigator, an affirmative action officer, “destroyed her contemporaneous interview notes” when she conducted an investigation for Richard Davenport, the college’s president.[4][5] The school’s investigator conducted flawed interviews in which questioning was not recorded or conducted under oath.[6][7]   Wiki

Of course they did.

For the record, an arbitrator ruled in Hoffner’s favor and he was reinstated as Head Coach in 2014.  He went on to win the NSIC Championship, whatever that is.

And we just know– we know– that the administrators who destroyed their notes were never punished.

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The Police Industrial Complex

I love PBS, and I like many episodes of Nova, but the May 29th Episode (2013) entitled “Manhunt – Boston Bombers” was a long, horny, love letter to new, expensive computer technologies, that look absolutely amazing but accomplish very little. And while Nova kind of admitted that, it still acted as if it kind of believed that running infrared scanners from a helicopter will one day help them catch terrorists, or that face recognition software will be able to look at a street video image and match it to a known criminal.

The face recognition software, conceptually at least, has some promise, but it should never be regarded as “proof” of anything for now: it’s an investigative tool. It’s not all that reliable, but it might be helpful for identifying people in a picture. Whenever you hear someone admit that they had to “enhance” the photo (while trying to make it sound magical), beware.

The infrared helicopter camera was just plain silly. The Boston police tried to argue that it helped them find Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hiding in the boat. Nova  extended a generous segment of rapturous adulation for the system, an advertisement, in fact, and allowed the police to suggest– not directly, but strongly– that Tsarnaev was found by the system. In fact, we know that a citizen saw him in the boat, and even looked into the boat and made eye contact, and then called the police. The police arrived and some idiot– on the police side– fired a gun– which caused all the courageous police officers to open fire, shooting madly in the vague direction of “something happened let’s shoot it” (it is a miracle no bystanders were killed), until Tsarnaev, completely unarmed, finally– equally miraculously– emerged from the boat to surrender, probably because there was no more room in the boat with all the lead the police had dropped into it.

Nevertheless, the police, and the media, reported an “intense firefight”.

Every time someone defends the police and I am tempted to acknowledge, yes, some police do good work, I think about stories about shit like this and pull back.

A day before, the police had cornered the suspects in a Mercedes SUV. No one, so far, has explained how the huge number of police surrounding the vehicle nevertheless allowed Dzhokhar to drive off, stop about a mile away, leave the vehicle and disappear. No doubt the police will erect monuments to their work somewhere near here. There will be a movie with the Tsarnaev brothers shown to have superhuman powers. But only one cop, we will learn, who broke the rules and ignored regulations, was able to subdue him.

In fact, the Nova episode, in spite of all the gee whiz demonstrations of new technology, made a convincing case for more police boots on the ground — if they could learn to restrain their weapons– and an alert citizenry, as the best defense against any criminality.

Those helicopters cost a fortune, about $3 million.  The infrared scanners cost about  $300,000.

The City of Toronto, rationally, decided, a few years ago, that the cost was not justified. The police, like little boys deprived of a new toy, whined about how they would never be able to catch any criminals any more.

The face recognition software is fated to be used by Republicans to scan protesters at their conventions.

Did You Know

This website has the balls to blatantly suggest that the thermal cameras found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hiding in the boat.  That is an outright lie.  It is interesting, though, that you see this story circulating.  Do the police mind that people believe expensive useless technologies with a high cool factor help them with police work?

Thermal Camera: $300,000

Manhunt – Boston Bombers

Do we live in a Surveillance State?

Yes we do.

Is it constitutional to contract out intelligence services?

I don’t think so and I want it on the record here and now so that, in twenty years, when it finally reaches the Supreme Court, I can say I was right.

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Rashomon Zimmerman

Anyone familiar with my previous comments on the police and murder investigations and wrongful convictions might be a bit surprised at my take on the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. Many people seem to have settled into a comfortable consensus that a suspicious Zimmerman chased Martin through a quiet neighborhood on a rainy night, even after the police dispatcher told him not to, and tried to detain him, because Martin was black, and then assaulted him and, when Martin defended himself, shot him to death. And that is almost indisputably what happened. Martin is dead, Zimmerman had the gun. Martin did not go looking for a guy in a pick-up truck. Zimmerman was looking for burglars.

The part that is hard to figure out is what happened exactly at the moment Zimmerman met Martin. The first narrative is that Zimmerman tried to detain or stop Martin from returning to the condo where he was staying with his father’s fiancé at the time, and when Martin refused to remain with him to wait for the police, Zimmerman tried to physically restrain him and a struggle ensued. During the struggle, Zimmerman reached for his gun and shot Martin in the chest. By this account, yes, Zimmerman was shooting in self-defense, in a sense: against a man resisting his attempt to detain him without cause. Given a richer understanding of all the information we have, that seems like the fairest explanation of why Zimmerman did have signs of injury on his face. No rational person can believe, in the least, that he simply walked up to Trayvon Martin and shot him. There was an altercation.

Zimmerman claims that Martin surprised him. But Zimmerman had left his car to go looking for Martin. I doubt we’ll ever know if Martin, knowing Zimmerman was following him, decided to confront him, or Zimmerman, trying to justify shooting an unarmed man, made it up. In Zimmerman’s parable, Martin says “you got a problem”? That’s good dialogue. That makes sense, in a way.

There are photos of Zimmerman’s face that show rather convincingly that he did take some abuse during the altercation. There is some evidence– fairly strong– that he called for help before the shooting. There is very convincing evidence that he followed Trayvon Martin and confronted him. Zimmerman was not wearing a police uniform because he was not a cop. He did not appear to have identified himself as a “neighborhood watch” official, as if. He was just a citizen with a gun in a nation that has insanely stupid laws about guns. As far as Trayvon Martin was concerned, this was just some prick following him and looking for a fight. Trayvon Martin is black. He knows what it’s like to be an instant suspect.

Under existing U.S. law and jurisprudence, if Trayvon Martin had had a gun, he could have simply shot and killed Zimmerman for following him in the dark. “Stand your ground”, man. In fact, let this be a cautionary tale for all black young men in the U.S.: join the NRA and start packing. And the first piece of information you want to get out there after you shoot somebody is “I was frightened” and “I am a member of the NRA exercising my sacred God-given right to defend myself”. You’ll be fine.

Yes, if the law were applied equally.

But, in fact, I suspect that if Martin had done so, he would have been arrested and charged with murder immediately, and the motive would have been robbery, and there would have been no long delay while people publicly disputed whether any racism was involved or if Zimmerman were on drugs, and the NRA would have not have stepped up to defend Martin’s sacred right to use a gun to defend himself when a strange mixed-race man approaches him in the dark. Does anyone doubt this? I’m open minded. Show a similar case.

This doesn’t obscure the fact that Zimmerman is a jerk precisely in the sense that he is a product of a mentality and culture that believes we would all be safe if we all had guns, safer than we would be if nobody had guns. But he is not a jerk in the sense that he seemed to be looking for someone to kill. He did something criminally stupid and he should be punished for criminal stupidity, but I haven’t seen any evidence to indicate that he acted out of malevolence.

 

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The Secret Constitution

The one thing people need to understand about the U.S. Constitution is that it does not have force. The government has force. So in that sense, the Constitution says exactly whatever the government says it says.

That is why no “constitutional” government ever violates the constitution. If the president does it, then it’s legal, as Nixon said.

The government puts on a dance of the seven legal veils, now you see it, now you don’t, appoints some compliant pussies to a secret court, strong-arms a few congressional representatives into complicity, beats its breast and weeps copious tears about how the greatest intrusion into citizens’ private lives is “constitutional” and legal and you should see how many terrorists we are catching! Except we haven’t caught anybody, yet. Except, it’s a secret. We can’t tell you because then we would have to have trials and facts and evidence, and we shouldn’t have to bother, because everyone knows the guys were caught were guilty, even if the only evidence is the compromised testimony of a corrupt informant.

Given the esteem with which Congress is now held by the American people, it is rather preposterous for defenders of the extensive surveillance conducted by the U.S. Government to keep tooting about Congressional oversight– it’s all okay, some congressmen and senators knew about it– as if that makes it constitutional. I’m not putting words into anyone’s mouth here: tonight on the PBS News Hour, that is exactly what some former general or admiral said. That’s like saying that the man who broke into your home at night and read all your mail was wearing a police uniform. Therefore, it was not a break-in.

Then you have the absurdity of Government spokesmen, including Obama himself, and Diane Feinstein, saying he would “welcome” a debate about the issue of the Government keeping a log of all your phone calls. But first, let’s string up the guy who let the cat out of the bag.

If the government had ever publicly announced that it was going to pass legislation enabling it to collect the data they are now collecting about all of your phone calls (and e-mail messages, and Facebook posts– let’s not fool ourselves), there would have been such an uproar that it would never have been passed, and they know it. The only reason about half the population right now approves of the measure is, firstly, because there are a lot of stupid people out there who don’t really give a damn about privacy or freedom, and, secondly, because it it was never proposed and discussed first. The results of any kind of discussion of this kind of extensive surveillance plan is a foregone conclusion: it would have been howled into oblivion. First the leaders, the lawyers, the constitutional experts, the civil rights activists would have spoken, and then the generals, the authoritarians, the nanny-state advocates, and the old white senators would have spoken.

And maybe then even some of those conservatives who wail like hysterical little wussies about intrusive government when it tries to pass a safety regulation or limit carbon emissions would have realized that Government surveillance of your phone records is a far greater threat to freedom than Obamacare ever was.

If the U.S. decided to kill Edward Snowden, can a drone reach Hong Kong? Ah, but the U.S. would never do that, would they? Well, they wouldn’t, but it’s instructive to consider why not. We send them to Pakistan all the time. What’s the difference?

Well, Pakistan is relatively powerless. They can’t do anything to us when we violate their airspace. China, however, obviously can.

Next, you’ll say, but Edward J. Snowden is an American Citizen! They can’t assassinate him, can they? Well, they probably won’t, now that he has gone public. They can’t disappear him now, I think. But if you can justify obtaining and storing millions of private phone records, and killing alleged American terrorists abroad, why not kill someone who is just as much of a “threat” to national security?

Aside from the fact that it’s too late.

Just to repeat what I’ve been saying for a long long time: there is no “war” on terror and there never was. This is a lie.

It could only be true if it were possible to prove that there would ever be circumstances in which we did not have any attacks that could be labeled as “terrorist” and held as justification for “war”. If you go back 30, 40, 50 years, you will find that there never was such a time. (Read your history: the air plane hijackings, the bombing in Beirut, the first World Trade Center attack, the Oklahoma bombing, etc., etc.) Therefore, the government is essentially arguing that we are always at war, therefore, “extraordinary” measures are always justified. There fore they are not justified. Therefore, the government is building a police state.

During the entirety of the “troubles” in Ireland, Britain never enacted laws giving the government the powers it gave itself after 9/11. We’ve been hoaxed by authoritarian officials who will never not try to aggregate as much power and authority as a conscientious citizenry will allow it.

The question is, do we even have a “conscientious citizenry” any more? It appears that the government– especially the Bush/Cheney regime– has succeeded in frightening people into submission. The people should be ashamed of themselves.

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The Expensive Iranian Hostage

The former U.S. hostages in Iran believe they should be able to sue the government of Iran for compensation for the horrible suffering they experienced during their 444 days of captivity. I don’t know what kind of scale can be applied here but I know that everyone thinks that their specific suffering is more entitled to sympathy and compensation than anyone else’s suffering, and that while it is never, ever about the money, it is always, always about the money.

And advertisers.

ABC Television decided to run a nightly news program called “Nightline” which was primarily a big fat wet kiss to Ronald Reagan: “The Hostage Crisis! Day blah-blah-blah” making it sound like the entire world had come to a stop to wait to see if the American hostages were going to make it home all right. There were ribbon campaigns, lots of speeches, and miserable old Jimmy Carter stewing in the White House incapable of doing anything about it. Other than, of course, the ill-advised rescue attempt.

The hostages were released after the Iranians were sure that Carter had lost re-election (after he stupidly launched a military rescue attempt) and a deal was concluded which, among other things, specified that the hostages could not sue the Government of Iran for damages.

The State Department had no objection to this clause because you can’t sue a sovereign government for damages anyway.

This outraged the hostages. “How dare the U.S. government sign an agreement that keeps us from untold wealth?!”  Did I say it’s not about the money?

They were hoping to go after seized Iranian assets. But you can see the problem, can’t you? The Iranians could turn around, of course, and sue the U.S. and Great Britain for sponsoring the coup that brought the Shah to power in the first place, and allowed him to repress and torture his own citizens for 35 years while looting the country of billions in oil wealth, and hold massive coronation parades for himself, and buying lots and lots of U.S. military equipment to defend Iran against– get this– the communists! Yes, it was a quaint period in our history..

Could native peoples sue our governments for forcing treaties on them and then violating those same treaties anyway? How about the Vietnamese, whose elected government was overthrown by the French, and then the Americans? Or Guatemala or Nicaragua? Why there is no end of tearful stories.

Among all the tearful stories in the world, the Iranian Hostages don’t rank among the teariest. For one thing, they were willing participants in a corrupt government relationship with a dictatorial regime. For another, it was Carter’s stupidity in allowing the Shah to enter the U.S. for medical treatment that precipitated the crisis. How kind, to our old friend, the dictator! Just as Thatcher was kind to Pinochet! Our selective kindnesses sometimes do us in.

And finally, the biggest complaint the hostages have about their treatment is that they were held against their wishes and they often feared that something awful was going to happen to them. In general, however, they were not treated too badly. Not nearly as badly as the dissidents the Shah imprisoned and tortured.

So, I’m not against compensation. Let’s add them to the list and indulge in no end of suit and counter-suit and counter-counter-suit.

Afterthought

Part of the story you won’t hear anything about: the families of the victims of the Newtown Connecticut attack are all going to receive big checks from the government.

So, you think, that’s nice. The government stepped in and compensated people who were victims of serious crimes. This required legislation because there is no existing government policy of compensating victims of violent crime.

So when can the mother of Trayvon Martin expect her check?

Oh wait…

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Amanda Cox Seeks a “Package”

What ABC could and did offer, instead, was an hour in prime time; teases of the interview on “World News”, the newly first -place morning show “Good Morning America”, “nightline,” and ABC’s local TV and radio affiliates.  Within the industry this is called the “package”. NY Times, February 12, 2013

The real package is, of course, Amanda Knox, who will enthrall millions of Americans on April 30 on ABC “News”. This is not news. It’s not journalism. It is the nauseous give and take of exploitation and titillation and scandal marketing. It is the news division committing incest with the entertainment division. The business of this entire process is not information or enlightenment or insight but how to disguise voyeurism as respectable information intercourse. We are all going to do the dance because we are happy to pretend to be appalled or sympathetic or curious or informed while   experiencing the thrill of dirty sex with a sexually vibrant young woman whose room-mate was murdered.

Amanda has a book to sell.

There is no personal experience so tragic or distasteful that the media are not willing to profit from it, nor women like Amanda Knox. But it will be packaged carefully. There will be some higher purpose given for the book, so readers won’t feel like they are expressing a prurient curiosity when picking it up at the bookstore. Let’s see– it’s a cautionary tale for young American women because she just doesn’t want anyone else to go through the ordeal she went through. Or a diatribe against the pernicious Italian justice system. Or let’s go with the Oprahfied version: “I just felt that it was time to tell MY story. There will be something about honoring the memory of her room-mate. There will be talk about who will play her in the movie. HBO or Hollywood? Can she sing? If yes, there’s always dinner theatre.

I do have a feeling she will eventually marry her body guard and go off somewhere and hide. She’s not made for this. The money is too tempting, but she’s not made for this and she may not handle it well.

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“No One Cares About These People”

Mr. Keane, in his Chronicle article, offered two major reasons the police lie so much. First, because they can. Police officers “know that in a swearing match between a drug defendant and a police officer, the judge always rules in favor of the officer.” At worst, the case will be dismissed, but the officer is free to continue business as usual. Second, criminal defendants are typically poor and uneducated, often belong to a racial minority, and often have a criminal record. “Police know that no one cares about these people,” Mr. Keane explained (NY Times, 2012-02-03)

And, I suspect, neither do you and I.

If you did, you would speak up, make your voice heard, vote for the progressive reformer, not the tough-on-crime conservative. But we don’t care about those people. Unless they are played by Morgan Freeman or Tim Robbins in a movie. Then we care a whole lot, because we really are good, decent people, and so is Morgan Freeman, and the fact that I just love him shows that I am not biased or bigoted. I judge people by what they actually do, not by which actor they look like.

And if the police lie in order to lock them up for a particular crime, it doesn’t really matter if they didn’t commit that particular crime: the important thing is that someone has been locked up for something.

Agencies receive cash rewards for arresting high numbers of people for drug offenses, no matter how minor the offenses or how weak the evidence. (NY Times, 2012-02-03)

How small a minority are we now, those who think “these people” do matter? That they have souls and feelings and inner lives? We’re not popular, that’s for sure. We are an affront to the overjoyed multitudes who love punishment because they really feel that that is the only way to keep people from taking our stuff or hurting us. This conversation takes place at one level and they either hurt us or we hurt them and if you help them you are hurting us.

My wife and I are watching “The Wire” right now. It’s a gritty, realistic police drama set in Baltimore. The police in “The Wire” cover all shades of humanity, from the obese thoughtless bureaucrat to the passionate honest street cop. The behavior of the cops on this show– and their physical appearance (as on “Hill Street Blues”, another of a handful of credible police dramas) strikes me as consonant with detailed news stories about crime and justice. Deals are struck. The really bad guys, with smarter lawyers, get the light sentences while the poor loyal schmuck who served them bears the brunt of the criminal justice system. And the police, in “The Wire”, lie. Sometimes for personal gain or to cover up incompetence or corruption. Sometimes in a well-meaning effort to put the bad guys behind bars.

Noted

Yes, the police have a tough job. So do criminal lawyers, and farmers and miners and lumberjacks, and doctors and teachers, and those kids who pick through the trash heaps in India. Cry me a river. If you don’t want to be a cop because somebody thinks you should actually be required to obey the law, or control your temper, or risk your life to try to disarm a suicidal homeless man… then get out and do something else.

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And Then He Joined the Marines

One youth Aspche counseled, who physically assaulted staff members at a mental health institution, was reacting to his own fears, Apsche theorized. His parents had subjected him to unimaginable abuse. After receiving MDT counseling — which combines behavioral science with concepts of acceptance and mindfulness, derived from Eastern and Western meditative practices — the boy changed, Apsche says, eventually enlisting in the Marines.
Washington Post, 2012-10-21

Jack Apsche has written a book about his new method of treating violent youth. It works really well: this one lad changed, and then enlisted in the Marines. He says he “hopes” to have the book published.

I don’t know if the humour there was unconscious or unintentional, but it is indeed hilarious. Unless you think the Marines might be poorly served by a boy with violent tendencies.

This is possibly even more fitting than you can imagine. Jack Apsche’s book is partly about his association with Gary Heidnik, the famous serial killer (and inspiration for the Buffalo Bill character in “Silence of the Lambs”). Heidnik also joined the army. He was rated, at basic training, as “excellent”. But somehow he lost his way and took to capturing young women and imprisoning them in a pit in the basement of his Philadelphia row-house where he tortured, raped, and abused them. Two of the women died and he was convicted of murder and eventually executed.

 

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Dr. Robert Sadoff and Jeffrey MacDonald

“I see no evidence for psychotic thought progresses either present or underlying, no evidence for hallucinations or delusions. He does not reveal evidence for serious psychoneurotic disorder with poor self control. He does not show evidence for a longstanding characterological disorder or a sociopathic personality disorder with acting out processes. He denies the use of drugs of any type, which could have stimulated an acute toxic psychotic state, resulting in loss of control and explosive violence.” Dr. Robert Sadoff quoted in Errol Morris’s A Wilderness of Errors in regard to Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, who was later convicted of murdering his wife and two young daughters in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, February 17th, 1970.

That statement should be disturbing to all of us.

Firstly, if you believe that Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald murdered his wife and two daughters on February 17, 1970, then you have an allegedly reputable psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Sadoff, offering a ridiculously inept misdiagnosis of a violent psychotic killer, a man who stabbed his own daughter with an ice pick and battered his wife’s head with a club of some kind and stabbed her 21 times with the same ice pick and then devised some preposterous story about drug-crazed hippies conducting a Manson-like slaughter in his home to tell the military police investigators.

No symptoms of any “characterological” disorder, according to Dr. Sadoff.

But if you believe MacDonald was railroaded, Dr. Sadoff’s comments are no less disturbing. Are you blown away by his scintillating use of pseudo-scientific jargon? Just what is a “characterological disorder”? Is this something you can measure or calculate based on anything other than a conversation? A conversation which is an exchange of words which is judged by man with credentials and then presented to the public and the courts and the investigators as some kind of scientific conclusion?

Is there a necessity for the phrase “longstanding characterological disorder” or for the phrase “sociopathic personality disorder with acting out processes”? What if Dr. Sadoff just said this:

“Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald seemed like a nice guy. I liked him. He didn’t yell or get angry or threaten me in any way. I thought he was swell.”

Ah, you say. No court would accept that as “expert” testimony. It would have no authority, no cachet. The attorney’s would not nod their heads knowingly or consult their table of characterological disorders to see if all the criteria were met.

Dr. Sadoff would probably admit that he is not God. He does not see into anyone’s mind. He does not have any special gift for un-encrypting the myriad complexities of nuance and suggestion and subtle inference and implication and allusion and random snatches of impulse and vocabularic irregularity (if he can make up words with dubious meanings, so can I). He had a conversation with Jeffrey MacDonald. He knows no more than any smart person could possibly know from a conversation with a suspected killer. He merely knows how to produce psychology theatre and, unfortunately, many people are convinced that there is a secret script that can be decoded by magical people with degrees and certificates.