and again leans back in her chair. Five minutes, the clock tells her. She is thinking about something her forensic psych professor once did in class. Professor Benicke, one of her favorites, may be the reason she’s chosen this peculiar and not very prestigious and certainly unremunerative branch of psychology. A winter’s afternoon at Cornell, the sun slipping behind the bluffs at a quarter to four, scant leaden light through the windows, the room darkened, the clicking sound of a film projector. He’d shown them nearly the whole of Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc. They had all watched the silent movie in silence, and then as the lights came up on the blinking class, he’d demanded: Well? Is she competent? Forget she’s a saint, forget the trial was rigged, forget the politics. From what you see, is this woman competent to stand trial on a capital charge?
It had been an interesting debate. What had she said? She knows where she is, she knows the gravity of the charge, she puts up a spirited, logical defense, and it doesn’t matter if she’s hearing voices. If we declared everyone who heard voices incompetent, there wouldn’t be any trials, because we all hear voices, in a manner of speaking. We hear the voice of our conscience, don’t we? And if some people project the voice of their conscience outward onto the figures of saints, what does that have to do with competence? What indeed? After ten years of practice, however, the distinction seems less clear in the tangled life of the crazy poor than it was in the classroom or the law books.
She finds herself checking the box for Further Consultation Required and is somewhat surprised at herself. She is one of three experts charged by the criminal court of Dade County to determine competency in this case, and very, very occasionally the three experts do not agree, in which case the judge has the option of callingin another panel, or going with the majority. But it is considered bad form in the shrink world not to present a united front on competency, which is one reason for the consult request box. Lorna is signaling to her peers that this is a hard case and that the three of them should get together and try to get their ducks in a row. Into the out basket with Emmylou, then, and push the button to tell the guard to bring in the next one. She examines the top sheet on the file. Oh, good, a grounder!
A knock on the door and a big guard brings in the familiar shambolic figure of Rigoberto Munoz. This is his eighth run through the system. Munoz is a stocky man with tangled lank hair, skin the color of an old grocery bag, and a lot of tattooing on his thick arms. His face twists into bizarre expressions from time to time, for he suffers from tardive dyskinesia, the result of all the Thorazine and other major tranquilizers the helpful state has pumped into him over the decades, in order to, among other things, render him competent to stand trial. Munoz has no money and nowhere to live and has a venereal disease and, of course, the tardive dyskinesia, but his main problem, Lorna now learns from him, is that space aliens have implanted a robot in his belly, which robot is gradually pulling his penis into his body cavity. The robot is activated by alien agents, who use remote control devices disguised as cell phones. But Rigoberto is not fooled. That’s why he’s here, he explains to the interested lady, he stabbed one of the aliens on Flagler Street with the nail-equipped pole he uses to pick up the bits of trash that often contain secret messages from the good kind of space aliens.
It does not take Lorna long to classify Mr. Munoz as: 295.30, schizophrenia, paranoid type. The guard takes him away. Lorna knows that they will conduct him to a locked ward at Jackson, shoot him full of Haldol, drag him zomboid and tractable before the court, register his plea of guilty, sentence him to time served, and dump him back on the street with a prescription for
It had been an interesting debate. What had she said? She knows where she is, she knows the gravity of the charge, she puts up a spirited, logical defense, and it doesn’t matter if she’s hearing voices. If we declared everyone who heard voices incompetent, there wouldn’t be any trials, because we all hear voices, in a manner of speaking. We hear the voice of our conscience, don’t we? And if some people project the voice of their conscience outward onto the figures of saints, what does that have to do with competence? What indeed? After ten years of practice, however, the distinction seems less clear in the tangled life of the crazy poor than it was in the classroom or the law books.
She finds herself checking the box for Further Consultation Required and is somewhat surprised at herself. She is one of three experts charged by the criminal court of Dade County to determine competency in this case, and very, very occasionally the three experts do not agree, in which case the judge has the option of callingin another panel, or going with the majority. But it is considered bad form in the shrink world not to present a united front on competency, which is one reason for the consult request box. Lorna is signaling to her peers that this is a hard case and that the three of them should get together and try to get their ducks in a row. Into the out basket with Emmylou, then, and push the button to tell the guard to bring in the next one. She examines the top sheet on the file. Oh, good, a grounder!
A knock on the door and a big guard brings in the familiar shambolic figure of Rigoberto Munoz. This is his eighth run through the system. Munoz is a stocky man with tangled lank hair, skin the color of an old grocery bag, and a lot of tattooing on his thick arms. His face twists into bizarre expressions from time to time, for he suffers from tardive dyskinesia, the result of all the Thorazine and other major tranquilizers the helpful state has pumped into him over the decades, in order to, among other things, render him competent to stand trial. Munoz has no money and nowhere to live and has a venereal disease and, of course, the tardive dyskinesia, but his main problem, Lorna now learns from him, is that space aliens have implanted a robot in his belly, which robot is gradually pulling his penis into his body cavity. The robot is activated by alien agents, who use remote control devices disguised as cell phones. But Rigoberto is not fooled. That’s why he’s here, he explains to the interested lady, he stabbed one of the aliens on Flagler Street with the nail-equipped pole he uses to pick up the bits of trash that often contain secret messages from the good kind of space aliens.
It does not take Lorna long to classify Mr. Munoz as: 295.30, schizophrenia, paranoid type. The guard takes him away. Lorna knows that they will conduct him to a locked ward at Jackson, shoot him full of Haldol, drag him zomboid and tractable before the court, register his plea of guilty, sentence him to time served, and dump him back on the street with a prescription for
Similar Books
