-Caveat Lector- http://www.deathrow.at/polunsky/inmates/patterson_kelsey.html
In the crazy world of Kelsey Patterson, hell is a very special place. It is at once his consuming fear and his overpowering obsession. He believes, for instance, in "hell law," one feature of which involves a special book into which people can sign "hell pledges" against him for the purpose of inflicting pain, misery and even death. Patterson deals with this as best he can. Go to hell, he says when talking to judges, lawyers and prison personnel - anybody who might be in on the conspiracy against him. Go to hell, he writes in the furiously scribbled letters he mails daily to court officials, family members, politicians and anybody else who figures into his delusions. He usually says it slowly, not as a dismissive insult but a phrase with precise meaning. By employing it, he may ward off the effect of the hell pledges, somewhat like repelling vampires with garlic. Alas, Patterson has no such protection against the electrical implants that he says were placed in his body many years ago and which, he claims, sometimes control his actions. "Inert response motor immerse response motor implant devices" he calls them, and they are the reason he now sits on death row. It was no personal grievance that led him to murder two people one sunny afternoon, he has told relatives and attorneys. It was not his decision at all. Rather, the powers that be here in his hometown wanted to get rid of him because someone had filed a special hell pledge against him in court. So, by remote control, "they" made him commit the murders. "They have some type of implant devices that they used on me in the military, which I receive," Patterson testified at his competency trial. "Like the device that they put in the inner ear in which they can send subliminal messages and make a person act beyond their controllability to know you have taken an action." This is what Patterson believes. Or used to. He won't talk to lawyers, journalists or doctors anymore, so nobody is up on the latest wrinkles in his delusional system. He does not cooperate because he considers himself to be perfectly sane. As far as he's concerned, the effort to portray him as mentally ill is one more insidious facet of the greater conspiracy to destroy him and his family. How Patterson, 45, got into the mess that may cost him his life is no mystery. Left half-treated and unsupervised by the state for years despite a history of psychotically inspired, near-fatal assaults, he simply fulfilled a longstanding prediction about him when he shot to death Louis Oates and Kay Harris, a respected businessman and his secretary, for no obvious reason in 1992. But how he was considered sane enough to finally merit prosecution and conviction is puzzling. Patterson was not tried for two previous attempted murders because of his mental illness, severe paranoid schizophrenia. Both incidents involved the shooting of people he barely knew for no explicable reason. When the charge became murder, however, psychiatrists testified that he now met the legal threshold of sanity, that he had somehow changed, that he was only pretending to be ill, even though his delusional beliefs were the same as they had always been and the killings closely resembled the earlier assaults. This change of opinion leads attorneys for and relatives of Patterson, as well as mental health care advocates, to wonder whether the system is simply trying to bury one of itsembarrassments. "It was the darkest moment of my professional life," said Sam Hicks, his trial attorney, of the day Patterson was sentenced to die. "This is a case that never should have happened. He should have been institutionalized a long time ago. The system failed him. But they don'tindict the system." An old and sad story It has become an old and sad story. The virtual abandonment of long-term psychiatricinstitutionalization and the lack of aggressive community treatment has helped create apopulation of untreated or undertreated mentally ill. Usually poor and often unemployable, they get by as best they can. The lucky have familysupport. Others live in quiet desperation in halfway houses or cheap apartments - or on the street. A study released last year by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill found that fewer than half of the nation's 2 million schizophrenics receive appropriate care. Sometimes, in an unmedicated state, the ill end up confronted by police in encounters thatconclude fatally. Sometimes their psychoses translate into horrible crimes, at which point the criminal justice system is charged with resolving their fate. In Texas, the chance of a satisfactory outcome then is not great. An inability to convict a defendant because of insanity seldom results in his long-term placement in a secure, humane facility, or even in closely supervised outpatient treatment. Almost inevitably, he returns to the community at some point, where the burden falls on him and his family to maintain the psychiatric treatment that makes him competent and less of a threat. On the other hand, imprisonment in spite of obvious mental impairment makes criminals out of people who may not have the ability to form the criminal intent that is at the heart of the state's most serious laws. That they are routinely processed through the courts anyway says much about the lack of a good alternative and the public's unwillingness to turn mental illness into a get-out-of-jail -free card. "The public has a hard time accepting that a person who has committed this horrible crime is not going to be punished," said Ron Honberg, legal director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. "A lot of people view these as volitional disorders, essentially that the person is choosing to be mentally ill." It is no coincidence that prisons have filled up with mentally ill inmates as state psychiatricfacilities have decreased available space. That they make for a poor substitute should be obvious. If nothing else, prisons are remedies after the fact. Every inmate implies a victim. Patterson's acts make no sense. The search for an understandable motive ends nowhere. One cannot segregate the shooting of Oates and Harris from his ideas about hell pledges, implants and the corruption of public officials in this small East Texas city. In his final argument to the jury six years ago, prosecutor Paul Stafford asked jurors to dismiss the insanity claim. Stafford said Patterson knew what he was going to do that day and he knew it was wrong. "Kelsey Patterson is not insane," Stafford said. "He's just plain old mean." He could be mean, those who know him agree, especially when he was drinking and unmedicated. And because sanity is a legal term, not a medical one, he could in a technical, legal sense, have been sane at the time of the killings. The only requirement for sanity in Texas is knowing the difference between right and wrong. But to suggest, as the prosecution did, that he was not crazy, that he was faking, seems to deny two decades of a troubling and violent personal history. Lifelong suffering Ever since he was a young man, Kelsey George Patterson has been tormented by a world that is too much with him. Nobody remembers where or how it all began, the imagined conspiracy to ruin his life. Somewhere along the line, as he began to approach adulthood, he snapped. Just like that. The oldest of five children, he joined the Air Force after graduating from Palestine High School in 1972. He left the service after two years on a hardship discharge because of the death of his grandmother, who reared the children. Years later, his siblings suspected that something happened during his brief military career to tip off his commanding officers that Patterson was not right in the head. Years of strange and belligerent behavior followed, earning Patterson a diagnosis of schizophrenia and some perfunctory treatment at two state mental hospitals. The doctors who saw him periodically during the 1980s were aware of how explosive he could be when unmedicated, which was most of the time, and reported as much. They told the courts he was insane, treated him with anti-psychotic medications, and then ultimately released him when no prosecutions were forthcoming. Then, on the afternoon of Sept. 25, 1992, he rose from the porch of his home in Palestine, grabbed his pistol and walked a hundred yards or so to a local oil distributorship. There he found Oates, the father of one of his high-school classmates, on a loading dock. Though he had exchanged chit-chat with Oates on previous days - Oates would sometimes kid him that his son had been the better football player when both were on the team - there was no conversation on this day. Patterson came up behind him and shot him in the head without warning. As he walked away, Oates' secretary emerged from an adjacent office andscreamed. Patterson grabbed her and she began to struggle, begging him not to shoot her. "You ain't going to get away with it," Patterson repeatedly said before pulling the trigger again. Patterson then ran home and removed all his clothes save for a pair of orange socks. He put down the gun, then paced up and down the street yelling as he waited for police. The man with whom he was living at the time, Andrew Gaston, later testified that Patterson had been talking to himself that day. He said he had also taken the gun out in the back yardearlier in the day and shot at a pan in what looked like target practice. Asked to describe Patterson's demeanor at the time, Gaston was succinct. "Like he was bothered by something," he said. Trouble coming One of Patterson's brothers had seen trouble coming. Familiar with the roller-coaster swings of his illness, the brother, who asked not to be named, said he called the police department, the sheriff's office and mental health authorities in an attempt to get Patterson picked up. "They knew Kelsey was sick to the point of hurting someone," the brother said. "We as a family could see he was going bad. They said they could not do anything until he did something or threatened somebody." Had there been a place in Texas for the violent mentally ill, or even a program specifically designed to deal with them, the lives of Oates and Harris might not have hinged on a warning unheeded. Oregon, for example, allows a special division within its state psychiatric system to maintain jurisdiction over an incompetent defendant for as many years as the maximum penalty to which he would otherwise have been subjected. The Texas penal code offers far less structure. A criminally insane defendant remains in a state psychiatric facility until he has achieved "maximum benefit." It is then up to the court of jurisdiction whether to accept his release or send him back for another 90-day stay. Long stays are rare. Patterson first gained the attention of authorities with a brief stay in Anderson County jail for criminal trespass in 1977. When he got out, he left town to find a job in Dallas. Around the same time, he was hospitalized for the first time for "headaches." In May 1980, while working as a groundskeeper at Parkland Hospital, he shot a co-worker he thought was conspiring against him. The worker, Richard Lane, did not know Patterson - it was Lane's first day on the job - but Patterson apparently had become convinced that he was involved in an attempt to poison his food. Lane survived despite multiple wounds. Patterson was sent to the maximum security unit at Rusk State Hospital for evaluation. There he was seen by Dr. James Grigson, who found him incompetent to stand trial. Months later, after treatment, Patterson had been made competent, but a second physician decided that at the time of the defense he was suffering from mental illness and not able to conform his behavior to the law, then a provision of the insanity defense statute. In November 1983, having returned to Palestine, Patterson again shot a co-worker, this time at a local pizza restaurant. His motive was known only to himself, but Kevin Hughes, like Lane, was lucky to survive. Patterson chased him around the restaurant, firing a .25-caliber semiautomatic, and finally out the door in an attempt to kill him. "He shot me in the back as I pushed the door open," said Hughes, a college student at the time and now a police lieutenant in Richardson. "When I got outside, he shot once more and grazed me on the head. Then he ran out of bullets." The only reason Patterson gave for wanting to kill Hughes had to do with a comb. He was under the mistaken belief that Hughes had taken it. Later he told doctors that Hughes had been harassing him and that he was justified in shooting him. Five months at Rusk Patterson spent five months at Rusk before being discharged as competent to stand trial and returned to Palestine. But the medical report was no help to the prosecution. It noted that Patterson had been acutely psychotic and unable to conform his behavior to the law. Patterson was released from Anderson County Jail in September 1984 after the attempted murder charge was dismissed. Patterson found himself in trouble again, this time in Dallas, in July 1986 when he hit a co-worker in the head with a board. He was sent to the state hospital in Terrell for evaluation and treatment. Doctors there noted that Patterson was unable to function long in any job before the stress of being in a workplace would provoke more delusions and make him physically aggressive. While in Terrell, Patterson told his doctors that during his jail stay the guards were puttingsedatives in his meals and that he was being spoken to over the loudspeakers at night. He also hallucinated that he had been raped while he slept. As with the previous incidents, no charges were pursued. Patterson continually denied he was mentally ill and would not regularly take the medication prescribed for him. Relatives had him hospitalized once more in 1988, complaining that he had threatened them. They reported that he was talking to people who were not in the room and that he constantly complained of people trying to poison him. "The patient is plagued with a paranoid illness," one doctor summarized, "and has had continuous abnormal social interaction as a result of his illness with an attempted murder charge in the past, poor insight (into his illness) and heavy use of denial." The doctor said Patterson should continue to be hospitalized. He was, for 34 days. Later that year, Patterson was admitted to a local mental health clinic for a brief stay because he was threatening family members, not taking his medications and walking incessantly around the streets of Palestine. The treating physician noted only that his "prognosis is rather guarded" because of Patterson's unwillingness to comply with treatment plans. Through all the treatment and hospital stays, Patterson's delusions never abated. His brother recalled that he would sometimes put tape on the edges of his windows and doors to see if anyone had come in. Sometimes he would hear people talking to him through the walls. The year before the killings, Patterson had been beaten up. He was convinced that people in local authority had sent the man who did it. For protection, he bought a gun from a Palestine pawn shop, never disclosing his mental history on the forms required for firearms purchases. Jeff Herrington, the district attorney at the time, never hesitated in pursuing capital murder charges. Though aware of Patterson's mental history, Herrington felt he was legally sane at the time of the offense. Of importance was the fact that Texas' sanity statute had been changed over the years, as had those in a number of states following the insanity acquittal given John Hinckley in his assassination attempt against President Reagan. An inability to conform one's behavior to the law was no longer a way to escapeconviction. "These (sanity) issues were addressed under the law as written," Herrington said. "The jury could consider them. I think he knew what he was doing and that there would beconsequences." `Like day and night' At Patterson's trial, Grigson, the first doctor who had diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, testified that his behavior and appearance seemed quite different from 12 years earlier, "sort of like day and night." He acknowledged that Patterson had spoken to him for less than five minutes and would not agree to an evaluation. Nevertheless, Grigson testified that Patterson, though still mentally ill, knew the difference between right and wrong and was sane at the time of the offense. He ruled out any possibility that Patterson had been delusional at the time of the killing, even though he did not see him until seven months later. Patterson constantly disrupted his trial by talking. He spoke to witnesses directly and frequently offered irrational commentary. The judge had him removed from the courtroom for much of the trial or sometimes simply gagged him. To Grigson, this behavior was further evidence that Patterson had gotten much better. Ditto the densely packed and incomprehensible letters he wrote every day to public officials and law enforcement agencies. "What he's saying now is all very deliberate and intentional in order to con the people," Grigson testified. Under cross-examination, Grigson admitted he had testified as to competence, sanity, mental status and criminal personality in more than 2,000 cases, always for the state. He eventually earned the nickname "Dr. Death" because his testimony was pivotal in sending so many defendants to death row. His cocksure testimony ran him afoul of his own professional associations, however. In 1995, he was expelled from the American Psychiatric Associations and the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians for offering psychiatric diagnoses without examination and asserting 100 percent certainty on the question of a defendant's future dangerousness. Herrington, who is now in private civil practice, is matter-of-fact about Patterson's case. He acknowledges there should have been somewhere to place him long before he killed anybody, a place to fill in the gap between prison and an unsupervised return to the community. But once the murders had been committed, he felt he had no choice about pursuing the maximum punishment. "There was no place to put him. You had to do something with him. His crime fell under the capital murder provisions. I don't second-guess myself," Herrington said. Hicks, Patterson's attorney, said the jurors found him guilty and gave him the maximumpunishment because they were scared of him. If so, there is ample reason to be. There also is reason to question whether the mental health or criminal justice systems could ever assure the public that Patterson, if acquitted because of insanity, would remain forever locked up in a psychiatric facility. But Honberg, whose organization strongly opposes execution of the mentally ill, said calls for vengeance miss the point when killers are severely ill. "The point in his case is that we had every warning sign imaginable that in the throes of untreated mental illness he was capable of committing horrible crimes," Honberg said. "All he needed was a program that assured long-term treatment for him." Instead, Honberg said, the prosecutors saw no reason to pursue cases against him, and neither the courts nor mental health officials aggressively asserted jurisdiction. "When the system had a chance to help him, it failed," he said. Kelsey Patterson # 999065 Polunsky Unit 12002 FM 350 South Livingston, Texas 77351 ++++++ The Associated Press State & Local Wire February 10, 1999 HEADLINE: Elevator slasher found guilty but insane DATELINE: PORTLAND, Ore. A Portland man who slashed a stranger in the face and neck while riding in the elevator of a downtown office building was found guilty but insane Tuesday. Todd Allen Bell, 36, was sentenced to 40 years under the supervision of the Psychiatric Security Review Board and will be sent to the Oregon State Hospital. The slashing nearly severed the victim's carotid artery, which could have killed him, said Greg Horner, a senior deputy district attorney. "This guy was the proverbial innocent victim," Horner said. On Feb. 23, 1998, Robert M. Mack, 29, was waiting for the elevator on the ninth floor of the Union Bank of California Tower, according to police reports. Mack told police that Bell pushed past him, got onto the elevator and stood in the back. Mack got on with him and pushed the button for the ground floor. After the doors shut, Bell suddenly lashed out at Mack with a knife, giving him a 4-inch gash on his face and a 2 1/2-inch cut to his neck. ... Bell later told authorities that he saw fire around Mack's neck and heard voices telling him that Mack was going to kill him. He said he used a scalpel he had taken from a doctor's office. A psychiatrist declared Bell psychotic and said he suffers from hallucinations and depression. The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle February 10, 1999 HEADLINE: HIGH COURT WILL HEAR INSANITY APPEAL The Georgia Supreme Court is set to decide if a Savannah man who killed his father and gouged out his eyes to prevent his resurrection as a vampire was innocent because he was insane at the time of the slaying. Chatham County Superior Court Judge James Bass found Michael Norman Webb guilty but mentally ill Sept. 24, 1996. Mr. Bass gave Mr. Webb a life sentence plus five years for killing his father, the Rev. Richard Webb. ... A psychologist and a psychiatrist both testified during the Savannah trial that Mr. Webb, who has suffered from paranoid schizophrenia since age 15, was delusional at the time he repeatedly stabbed his father with a kitchen knife and screwdriver before digging the eyes out hours later. Kennebec Journal (Augusta, ME) February 11, 1999 HEADLINE: Judge denies woman's request to leave AMHI AUGUSTA - A Portland woman who bludgeoned her mother to death on Peaks Island 27 months ago has been denied permission to move to a transitional treatment facility in Portland. Virginia Green, 49, petitioned a Maine court last fall to release her from the custody of the commissioner of the Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services, and allow her to move to a one-year program at Randall Place, a dual-diagnosis transitional treatment living facility. ... According to testimony at that time, Virginia Green had been psychotic and delusional and under the influence of particularly strong marijuana when she killed her mother by hitting her in the head with a rock. She told police she believed her mother was Satan. Virginia Green was diagnosed in the early 1970s with a bipolar condition (also known as manic-depressive disorder) that is exacerbated by substance abuse. In his denial, Atwood noted that through her illness and her work advocating for the mentally ill, Green had attempted to medicate herself with alcohol and marijuana and elected 'to monitor her own mental health.' Copley News Service February 11, 1999 HEADLINE: Gammon gets indefinite term for killing father DATELINE: EUREKA Michael Gammon will spend an ''indefinite'' amount of time in a locked mental health facility for killing his father, but his prognosis for rehabilitation is good, officials said Thursday. Gammon, 22, who suffers from schizophrenia, appeared in Woodford County court for a final, formal hearing regarding the shooting and stabbing death of his father, Gary Gammon, last May. He will remain at Alton Mental Health Center for an ''indefinite'' amount of time, Judge Stephen Pacey of Ford County ruled. ... On May 27, 1998, Gammon shot his father, Gary Gammon, the dean of Eureka College, in the kitchen of their home, using his father's own rifle. As his father tried to get away, Gammon followed him into a neighbor's yard and stabbed him. Gammon, 56, died at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center during surgery. Three psychiatrists who examined Gammon reported that he was suffering from an episode of schizophrenia during the killing. For several nights prior, Gammon stayed awake until dawn ''because he was having thoughts that his father was trying to hypnotize him while he was asleep,'' one doctor wrote. He feared his father was part of a government plot orchestrated by aliens, according to their reports. ''I know it sounds ridiculous now, but it was really real to me at the time,'' Gammon told Dr. Philipp Bornstein last summer. Dr. Robert Chapman of Normal, who also examined Gammon last year, said Thursday Gammon's chances of rehabilitation are good. Gammon will not necessarily be cured, Chapman emphasized, but he should be able to control his symptoms ''as many schizophrenics do hold down jobs, be a taxpayer, get married and have a family just like all people with a chronic disease. ''The prognosis on this guy is good. He's young and he got into therapy young, though through an unfortunate way. But nevertheless, he got into treatment early in his disease.'' Feeney agreed. ''I'm certainly no expert, but this is a disease that can be successfully treated and, most often, actually is,'' through counseling and medication, he said. ''I would envision at some point and time, he will gain his freedom.'' Though Gammon showed mild signs of mental illness in the months before the killing, his behavior was not violent or obvious, the doctors' reports said. Chapman said that is not unusual. ''In young males, the first onset of an episode is often associated with violence,'' he said. Newsday (New York, NY) February 18, 1999 HEADLINE: TESTS ORDERED ON PANHANDLER A panhandler charged with setting an Ozone Park church ablaze was ordered to undergo psychiatric testing yesterday during a court hearing at which he appeared disoriented and groggy. "Do you know why you're here?" Criminal Court Judge Darryl Gavrin asked Calvin Bostick at his arraignment in the Kew Gardens courthouse. "Not really," Bostick replied, his left hand massaging his nose and face. Bostick also told the judge that he "heard voices," and "I have headaches." The judge ordered Bostick held without bail pending the outcome of the psychiatric exams . He did not enter a plea to reckless endangerment and other charges stemming from the arson Monday that damaged St. Anthony of Padua Church after Bostick allegedly was rebuffed for panhandling. ... LaGreca said that before he was read his rights, Bostick told detectives: "I hear voices. It was a mistake. The voice told me to go inside and do harm. I went inside. I struck and set the curtain on fire." LaGreca also said that after being read his rights, Bostick told detectives: "After being turned down by the rectory, I heard voices that told me to do harm. I entered the church and set the curtains on fire." ... +++++++ http://www.aafs.org/AcademyNews/Nov2001/SupremeCourt.htm No Violation of the Right of Confrontation for an Expert to Rely Upon the Work Product of Others: Not even the presence of Alan Dershowitz could save John E. du Pont of the du Pont family fortune from a conviction for murder and a sentence to thirteen to thirty years confinement. Nor did it have a leavening effect on the Pennsylvania Superior Court which affirmed du Pont�s conviction and sentence. du Pont admitted to having cold-bloodedly killed David Schultz, a wrestling coach at du Pont�s 800 acre �Foxcatcher Farm.� du Pont had established a school for wrestlers on his estate and Schultz was one of the better wrestlers at the school. Indeed he was an Olympic gold medalist seeking a return to his former prominence. Schultz�s death was the culminating event in a series of incidents in du Pont�s behavior which were characterized by irrational acts. From the time of his mother�s death in 1988 du Pont�s actions had metamorphosed from the inexplicable to the bizarre. For example du Pont�s overriding penchant for security seemingly knew no limits. He installed razor wire in the walls of his home to keep people from hiding behind those walls. He had excavators dig and dig again on his property so as to ally his fear that people in underground tunnels on his property constituted a threat to his well-being. The reports of du Pont�s outlandish behavior demonstrated that he had gone from worse to worst. Not only did he consider himself to have god-gifted powers, such as his demand to be known as the Dalai Llama of the West and the Buddha of the East, but he acted on that irrationality by driving two Lincoln Continentals, one after the other, into a lake on his property, escaping from them just before the cars sunk out of sight. That du Pont was not averse to violence was manifested on various occasions. He is said to have blown to smithereens a newly born family of foxes which were resident on his estate and in doing so for no discernible reason. It might have been his overweening suspicion that he had been targeted by all and sundry for the scrap-heap. The geese that he manicly killed were casting spells on him, so he maintained. And the treadmills, inanimate objects though they were, were removed from his training facility because he was of the view that the clocks on the treadmills were trying to backpedal him into a time warp. His imaginary enemies were everywhere, no rock was too small to hide them. There were Nazis in the trees on his estate. There were bugs crawling over his body. And he was convinced that the wrestling mats used by his wrestling team were overrun with ticks. To save himself from these adversaries he shot the Nazis out of the trees. He scratched the bugs off his body with such ardor that he drew his own blood. He rid his mats of the ticks by a solution so simple and logical that it seemed totally out of character for him to think of replacing the mats. To show his disdain for those who could not pronounce his middle name Eleuthere he proclaimed himself to be the eagle, in fact �the Golden Eagle of America.� And he played out this fantasy by climbing a ladder into a wooded warren of twigs and branches and perching there, as if he were a bird, while flapping his elbows in bird-like gyrations. His patters of behavior were so far out of reach that his fantastical gambits were beyond anyone�s comprehension or prediction. It was in the afternoon of January 16, 1996, that du Pont cracked and committed the murder for which he was to be charged and convicted. In the company of one of his security personnel, du Pont approached the victim Schultz while Schultz was working on his car on the Foxcatcher grounds. No sooner did du Pont ask Schultz if �you got a problem with me� then he shot Schultz three times with a revolver. After holing up in his mansion for two days with his local police friends surrounding his mansion, du Pont was finally arrested when he exited his house to restoke the boiler providing heat for his quarters, which the police had turned off. Obviously du Pont�s erratic behavior before and at the time of the murder caused him to undergo a number of mental examinations to decide on his competence to stand trial. Ultimately du Pont was cleared by the mental health professionals and stood trial, a trial which was a court watcher�s delight, the gaunt and unkempt 57-year-old du Pont taking center stage. Since du Pont admitted he shot Schultz the trial became a test of psychiatric experts� wills and opinions. On his behalf Schultz�s expert described him as a �paranoid schizophrenic� with extremely delusional attitudes. The question for the jurors was whether du Pont was not guilty due to insanity or guilty but mentally ill; the latter verdict allowed under Pennsylvania law and a half dozen or so other states. The jury sided with the prosecution in returning a verdict of guilty but the disoriented murderer got the benefit, such as it was, of a guilty but mentally ill verdict. An appeal followed. Among other issues before the appellate court du Pont placed heavy reliance on the claim that his Sixth Amendment�s constitutional right to confrontation had been compromised at the trial. To him the state�s psychiatrist�s relying on information from a non-testifying employee of du Pont concerning du Pont�s strange behavior was constitutionally outre. The court on appeal disagreed and did so con brio. It was said to be well established in Pennsylvania (as it is elsewhere) that �a medical expert is permitted to rely on reports of other persons who do not appear of record so long as such is the common practice among such experts in general.� To do so was said not to be an attack on �the integrity of the fact-finding process� requiring recourse to the Sixth Amendment�s confrontation clause to reject such an expert�s opinion. The fact that experts regularly rely on such hearsay information in formulating their opinions was said to be strong medicine supporting the trustworthiness of such out of court statements. The Pennsylvania appeals court was not about to constitutionalize the Pennsylvania rules of evidence through resort to the confrontation clause. The result, if the constitution were construed as overriding the rules of evidence, would be an immense and startling change in the current practice of pathologists, psychiatrists, and other forensic scientists. du Pont�s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court emphasized the quirky constitutional nature of the guilty but mentally ill verdict of the jury. That claim failed to convince four of the justices to grant the appeal of this scion of an immense family fortune. And that was du Pont�s ill-fortune. Comm. v. du Pont, 730 A. 2d 970 (Pa. Super 1999). John E. du Pont has been the subject of a number of books profiling his life. See Turkington, Carol, No Holds Barred: the Strange Life of John E. du Pont, K.C., Mo: Turner Pub., 1996; Ordine, Bill and Vigoda, Ralph, Fatal Match, N.Y.: Avon Books, 1998. ++++++ M. F. Abernathy -- [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] -- 04/05/02 <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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