JSA Classified #4: A Medical Review
JSA Classified #2 “Power Trip, part 4 of 4″
Geoff Johns, writer
Amanda Conner, penciler
Psycho Pirate is talking to Kara (more correctly: talking at Kara) and telling her about how he came to be Psycho Pirate.
Psycho Pirate: My father was a psychiatrist. Always analyzing me. Always telling me my faults and weaknessess. Even on the stand.
Father (in Court): …son suffers from dissocial personality disorder. He’s never cared about anyone else besides himself and he’ll use anyone, including me and his mother, to get what he wants.
Dissocial Personality Disorder is more commonly known as Antisocial Personality Disorder. Individuals with this disorder have a complete disregard for the feelings and rights of others. They will do whatever they want to do, whenever, and feel no remorse or guilt about it.
I’m not sure that Psycho Pirate has antisocial personality disorder. He certainly has some antisocial personality traits, but he has traits of many other personality disorders as well (histronic, paranoid, narcissistic). He also kowtows to easily to others (Luthor, the Anti-monitor, etc.) to be a true antisocial personality disorder — true antisocial individuals refuse to respect any authority. (I’ll admit that my knowledge of Psycho Pirate is based on his appearances in Crisis on Infinite Earths, Animal Man, and JSA Classified. He may have been written written differently prior to the Crisis.)
I also have questions about this court scene. It seems that Psycho Pirate’s father has a hat trick going for him: not only is he the defendant’s father, but he’s also a victim (and witness), and an expert witness as well. There has to be a good objection in there somewhere.
Plus, how fast is the Earth-2 court system? The Pirate’s on trial for breaking his father’s arm and it’s still in the process of healing (6-8 weeks). That’s seems very fast for a trial. (See, I do pay attention over at Suspension of Disbelief).
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December 30th, 2005 at 2:21 am
A lot of evidence law is state law, and this is almost certainly a prosecution in state court, so if this is set in one of the imaginary DCU jurisdictions, it’s hard to say exactly what the law would be here. However, under the Federal Rules of Evidence, which state rules often mirror:
(1) Much of what Pirate-Dad is saying here would be considered character evidence (”He’s never cared about anyone else…”) and would be inadmissible unless Pirate himself first offered testimony to his good character, which he is unlikely to have done. Further, there is a serious concern about relevance here; it’s not impossible, depending on the facts of the case and the defense offered, but it’s hard to see exactly how Pirate’s empathy or lack thereof has a meaningful bearing on whether or not he attacked his father. I.e., a witness can’t simply come to the stand and go on and on about various aspects of the bad character of the defendant; the qualities testified to must be those the defendant would have demonstrated in carrying out the crime, such as a person with a bad temper’s getting involved in a bar brawl.
(2) The testimony about Pirate’s psychological condition would be considered expert testimony. The FRE do not actually require that an expert be disinterested in order to be qualified as such. However, no prosecutor with a lick of sense would offer as an expert whose credibility is so blatantly open to challenge by the defense. That is, the judge might permit Pirate-Dad to be qualified as such a witness (although he might regard Pirate-Dad as unable to make a reliable application of sound psychological principles to the data he’s gathered), but it would be so tactically stupid that no one would offer him as one. Depending on the circumstances of the case, this testimony may also be running afoul of the prohibition on expert witnesses’ testifying as to whether an individual defendant had a mental condition that is an element of the charge or of a defense.
(3) A lay witness, such as the defendant’s father, *can* testify to character and can make reasonable inferences as to people’s state of mind based on their observations, if he has a sufficient basis for his conclusion (i.e., “When my husband’s face got cold and still, I could tell he was really angry”). However, a lay witness cannot offer testimony on scientific or technical subjects, so his testimony about Pirate’s mental disorder would be inadmissible.
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