The psychiatrist as an expert witness in criminal court.

9?_92S2SHIS Academy stands this evening on the firm ground of progressive medicolegal thought on which it has stood 11 T zfor many years. Almost three-quarters of a century ago one of the keenest and most independent jurists this ,is25E5?S2~fl country has ever produced, Judge Edmonton, travelled across the river from New Jersey to appear on the platform of The New York Academy of Medicine and to speak with considerable understanding of the role of psychiatry in the court of law. In the mid-forties of the past century, American judges were able to improvise with great sagacity and courage as to how the expert testimony of the doctor, particularly that of the "alienist," should be treated. Justice Shaw of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts instructed juries to consider the expert opinion of "these learned gentlemen" (by this he meant us, medical experts) as evidence. The task of the medical expert witness is a solemn and, more often than not, a painful one: for he who has been trained to heal and to save lives may at some time be forced by circumstances either to contribute to a man's being convicted and sentenced to death, or to stand up and fight with all the power of his service to scientific truth for a poor derelict against whom the law and public opinion are both aroused and uncompromising. It is easy, for instance, to imagine the silent anguish with which the then professor of anatomy Oliver Wendell Holmes testified against his colleague Webster, who had murdered another colleague Parkman, in cold blood. It is even more difficult for a psychiatrist to testify in a case of burglary, rape, or murder and endeavor to present his honest conviction that the accused, the given burglar, arsonist, rapist or murderer in question happens to be a mentally sick person. The psychiatrist, despite