From the O. C.: "Dr. Demento"
Newspaper: Dietz finds insanity in the wrong places
The
Orange County Weekly has a few things to say about Dr. Park Dietz.
"This was an absolute figment of Dr. Dietz’s imagination," George Parnham, Yates’ attorney, recently told the Houston Chronicle. "How he transposed this unbelievable fantasy into fact on the stand is beyond me. I don’t think he lied intentionally. But his testimony was so dramatic."
That dramatic testimony capped one of the most dramatic infant homicide cases in recent memory. In July 2001, shortly after the birth of her fifth child, Yates snapped. Experts would later say the stay-at-home housewife suffered from severe postpartum depression, or that she merely crumbled under the pressure of a loveless marriage to a religious conservative, or was battling demonic schizophrenia; after her arrest, Yates herself told police Satan ordered her to kill the children.
Defense attorneys argued Yates was innocent by reason of insanity—and her depression, augmented by schizophrenic hallucinations, made it impossible for her to know right from wrong.
It wasn’t until a few days after the jury rendered its verdict that Dietz sent a letter to the court saying he had made a mistake.
"My memory about the content of the show was incorrect," Dietz stated. "I was confounding the facts of three filicide cases I worked on—Susan Smith, Amy Grossberg and Melissa Drexler—and two episodes of Law & Order based in part on those cases."
OCWeekly.com
Dietz, known as the FBI's top consultant on serial killers, is not purely a prosecution witness. While he has testified in high-profile cases including trials of John Hinckley, Jr., Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Kaczinski, the Menendez brothers, O.J. Simpson, and John Allen Muhammed, he has occasionally come down on the side of defendants, most recently in the case of Deanna Laney, who was charged with bludgeoning her sons to death on orders from God. (See
relate article.)
According to the
Weekly, Dietz also advises Fortune 500 companies on how to spot potential psychopaths among the workforce: "The improbable list includes almost everyone you work with," the newspaper asserts.
"We can tell which ones are going to be a pain in the neck if you don't intervene," Dietz told CBS'
60 Minutes.
And Dietz has also taught at several prestigious universities, and boasts that he doesn't actually see patients. "A lot of it is very boring. Treating private psychiatric patients ... means listening endlessly to people with fairly normal lives whine about why their lives aren’t as great as they wished."
While defense attorney George Parnham has said he doesn't think Dietz lied intentionally, perhaps it's time for the "good doctor" to lighten his load and make sure he provides the best ... um ... well, I was going to say "best care possible", but as a psychiatrist, that's apparently not his business.
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