Nonfiction NOBODY’S CHILD A Tragedy, a Trial and a History of the Insanity DefenseBy Susan Nordin Vinocour On Monday, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Kahler v. Kansas, a case that hinged on the question of whether the defendant, James Kahler, who killed his estranged wife, her mother and his two teenage daughters, could claim that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. Kahler’s legal team argued that he suffered from depression, and was so distraught on the night in question that he could not control his actions. They were challenging Kansas’ 20-year-old abolition of the insanity defense and effectively asking the court to overturn it.
The court did not, claiming that the state was within its constitutional rights when it decided to outlaw that legal classification. The ruling makes a new book, “Nobody’s Child” by Susan Nordin Vinocour, a psychologist and former prosecutor, particularly timely since Vinocour offers a forceful counterpoint to Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the majority opinion. Vinocour lays out the insanity defense’s historical roots, current usage and future prognosis in a way that makes us see it anew. Contrary to what most people believe, Vinocour writes, the insanity defense is deployed in less than 1 percent of criminal cases and is successful only about a quarter of the time.
Vinocour zeros in on this sliver of our legal system, allowing her to present close up the seemingly irreconcilable fields of modern scientific psychiatric research and criminal law. Today’s law, she persuasively shows, is based on precedents from a time when we knew almost nothing about mental illness. The danger, she suggests, is that we don’t seem to be doing much in our courtrooms to rectify this problem. To her credit, Vinocour never comes right out and says this; instead, she makes her case delicately, every page offering an incriminating new piece of evidence, scientific fact or court case that demonstrates just how unjust our legal system is to anyone suffering the misfortune of mental illness.
Note here that I don’t say to anyone suffering mental illness who commits a crime, because it’s never quite clear that Dorothy Dunn, Vinocour’s pseudonym for the woman at the center of her book, has actually committed a crime. The whispered doubts slowly build to a powerful crescendo by book’s end, at which point we can only ignore them at our moral peril. The book opens in a dreary Rochester, N. Y.
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, neighborhood, when a lumbering, intellectually disabled woman in a “dime-store wig, perched awry” calls the police about a child lying on the floor of her pantry. The child turns out to be her 3-year-old grandson, Raymie, and he has been dead several days, having fallen from a counter while trying to reach a bag of sugar. Dunn seems to waver between understanding what’s happened and hoping Raymie will get better. (When the paramedics arrive, Dunn asks them, “You can fix him, can’t you?
”) Dunn is arrested, charged with second-degree murder and assigned a public defender named Karen Hughes. Hughes is just a few years out of law school, but she doesn’t dare turn down the judge’s order to take the case, even though she knows she is in over her head. The playing field was skewed from the start. Hughes hired Vinocour, then a forensic psychologist in Rochester, to assess whether Dunn was cognitively fit to stand trial.
Dunn’s life is a picture of poverty, inequality and racism — one impossible hardship after another. She suffered terrible abuse as a child and went on to have five children, each apparently by a different father, nearly all of whom were also cognitively challenged. She tried, and failed, to hold jobs — on an assembly line and as an aide in a nursing home.
“Raymie was born a drug addict and spent his life malnourished.”
He was hyperactive and aggressive. The night he died, he’d been trying to fry cornmeal and pepper in a pan. Dunn repeatedly found him turning on the gas stove in the middle of the night. She feared for her own and her children’s safety (at least two of her children were just a few years older than Raymie), and at one point tied Raymie first to herself and then to a metal grate to keep him from starting a fire in the middle of the night — an act that forces Vinocour to grapple with whether this makes Dunn “deficient in a moral sense.
” When she is charged with second-degree murder, it is on account of her “depraved indifference. ” As Vinocour assesses Dunn’s mental fitness, her argument takes on a prismlike complexity. The book is divided into three sections — the crime, the trial, the punishment — with the first taking up more than half the narrative. Vinocour is hesitant about meeting Dunn after seeing her on television, when a local station broadcast the story as a sensational crime.
Vinocour reveals that her own father was cruel and abusive, and that she escaped him by going to college and racking up professional accolades. And watching Dunn, Vinocour felt an instant disdain for her. But as we are slowly introduced to Dunn, her slowness, her gaze eternally “flat” or “vacant,” a haunting question repeats itself: What does it mean to know right from wrong in the abstract, but not to be able to make that distinction in practice? We can all agree that murder is wrong, but what about murder in order to save the life of another person?
Tying Raymie to a grate in the floor is wrong in the abstract, but is it also wrong when that child might burn down a house and kill others? Dunn told Child Protective Services that she couldn’t take Raymie in after his mother, who’d been homeless with him for months, was committed to psychiatric care. But the agency left the boy in Dunn’s care anyway. Who is “wrong” in this scenario?
Such difficult questions are at the heart of Vinocour’s investigation. As a writer, she occasionally leans on clichés — prison guards “bark” their orders, for example, and male prisoners greet her with “a chorus of hoots” and “cackling. ” And a few of her characterizations felt heavyhanded. Dunn is repeatedly introduced with descriptions of gastric distress, particularly burping.
Vinocour meets Dunn when she’s sitting on the toilet; Dunn meets Hughes with “a great, roiling burp. ” Nevertheless, in ways large and small, “Nobody’s Child” dismantles troubling legacies in our legal and mental health systems while also illuminating shortcomings in our approach to child protective services, foster care and incarceration — not to mention social ills like racism, poverty, gender and educational inequality. It is not, however, a prescriptive book. Vinocour offers no road map for how we might do better, just a long hard look at what we’ve done and where it’s brought us.
But this is also the book’s power: the knowledge that we have done this to ourselves, created this system of trap doors. Vinocour leaves us there, blinking in the wonderment of our own madness. After all, she writes, “Judging by humanity’s history, we are in greater danger from the sane than the insane.
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