Abstract
At a recent meeting of 60 federal judges from around the country, one of the trial judges defined the essence of the distinction between trial and appellate judges. “Trial judges,” he said, “are in the front lines of legal warfare; they are foot soldiers involved in bloody hand-to-hand combat. Appellate judges, in contrast, sit on a safe hill overlooking the battlefield. When the fighting is over, the appellate judge comes down from his position of safety and goes about shooting the wounded.” Similarly one could describe forensic psychiatry as a kind of hand-to-hand combat, and now as never before, the troops are wounded and bloody. Scholarly criticism has been blistering,1 and after the trial of John Hinckley, the media have been unrelenting in their attacks. Now, when forensic psychiatrists need encouragement, healing balms, and soothing treatment, I have come down from my ivory tower to “shoot the wounded.”
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Stone, A.A. (1990). The Ethics of Forensic Psychiatry. In: Rosner, R., Weinstock, R. (eds) Ethical Practice in Psychiatry and the Law. Critical Issues in American Psychiatry and the Law, vol 7. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1663-1_1
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