Nobody's Child: A Tragedy, a Trial, and a History of the Insanity Defense

by Susan Vinocour

Overview

A powerful and humane exploration of the history of the "insanity defense," through the story of one poignant case.

When a three-year-old child was found with a head wound and other injuries, it looked like an open-and-shut case of second-degree murder. Psychologist and attorney Susan Vinocour agreed to evaluate the defendant, the child's mentally ill and impoverished grandmother, to determine whether she was competent to stand trial. Even if she had caused the child's death, had she realized at the time that her actions were wrong or was she legally "insane"?

What followed was anything but an open-and-shut case. Nobody's Child traces the legal definition of "insanity" back to its inception in Victorian Britain nearly two hundred years ago, from when our understanding of the human mind was in its infancy, to today, when questions of race, class, and ability so often determine who is legally "insane" and who is criminally guilty. Vinocour explains how "competency" and "insanity" are creatures of a legal system, not of psychiatric reality, and how, in criminal law, the insanity defense has to often been a luxury of the rich and white.

Nobody's Child is a profoundly dignified portrait of injustice in America and a complex examination of the troubling intersection of mental health and the law. When prisons are now the largest institutions for the mentally ill, Vinocour demands that we reckon with our conceptions of "insanity" with clarity, empathy, and responsibility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393651928
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/24/2020
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Susan Vinocour is a retired clinical and forensic psychologist, a former prosecutor, and a former associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester School of Medicine. She lives in Pittsford, New York.

Table of Contents

A Note to Readers xi

Prologue xiii

Part I The Crime 1

Part II The Trial 197

Part III The Punishment 281

Epilogue 299

Acknowledgments 305

A Note on Sources 307

Notes 313

Index 327

Editorial Reviews

Vinocour lays out the insanity defense's historical roots, current usage and future prognosis in a way that makes us see it anew…Vinocour zeros in on this sliver of our legal system, allowing her to present close up the seemingly irreconcilable fields of modern scientific psychiatric research and criminal law. Today's law, she persuasively shows, is based on precedents from a time when we knew almost nothing about mental illness. The danger, she suggests, is that we don't seem to be doing much in our courtrooms to rectify this problem. To her credit, Vinocour never comes right out and says this; instead, she makes her case delicately, every page offering an incriminating new piece of evidence, scientific fact or court case that demonstrates just how unjust our legal system is to anyone suffering the misfortune of mental illness.

The New York Times Book Review - Rachel Louise Snyder

★ 01/27/2020

As Vinocour, a clinical and forensic psychologist, writes in this moving, well-researched account of the insanity defense, she really didn’t want to get involved in the case of the woman she calls Dorothy Dunn, a poor black woman with mental health issues accused of killing her three-year-old grandson, but she agreed to do a psych evaluation. Vinocour, herself a victim of child abuse, was skeptical at first that Dunn wasn’t guilty. But through the course of the evaluation, she came to realize Dunn wasn’t competent to stand trial for second-degree murder because she was not coherent; despite Vinocour’s testimony, the jury disagreed, and the woman was sentenced to 25 years to life. Vinocour explains that the insanity defense is rarely used because it’s too difficult to explain to a jury. She also examines cases showing the history of the plea, including that of the man who tried to assassinate Andrew Jackson in 1835, one of the few times the defense worked, and that of Daniel M’Naghten, who tried to assassinate the British prime minister in 1843. M’Naghten’s insanity plea was denied, however, because the law proved that he knew, but did not understand, the act was wrong. And that was what ultimately doomed Dunn, whose sad story constitutes more than half the book. Vinocour does a fine job explaining the defense in layman’s terms. Sterling prose helps make this a page-turner. Agent: Jennifer Herrera, David Black Agency. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"A deeply moving tale of what happens when we ‘treat’ severe poverty and mental illness through the criminal justice system. Drawing on her firsthand experience and expertise with a modern-day insanity defense trial, Susan Vinocour writes like a novelist, showing us in riveting detail just how injustice operates."

David Cole

"In the age of the accelerated news cycle, the weaponization of outrage, and the easy rush to judgment, Nobody's Child is a harrowing journey through our broken judicial system. Susan Vinocour's expertise as a forensic psychologist—along with her humanity and literary talent—makes for a galvanizing read and, ultimately, a much-needed call for compassion."

Jessica Bruder

"As passionate as she is knowledgeable, Susan Vinocour brings humanity and dignity to telling the story of a woman whose voice we would otherwise never hear. Nobody's Child wraps a powerful narrative, a thought-provoking reflection on truth and evidence, and a wake-up call about the law's misunderstandings of mental illness into one unforgettable book."

Susan Cheever

02/01/2020

In her first book, attorney and psychologist Vinocour recounts a murder case in which a grandmother was convicted of second-degree murder after her grandson fell while trying to reach an item on a high shelf. In exploring the facts of the case, Vinocour considers whether the grandmother, who lived with mental illness, was competent to stand trial. The author maintains that she was; however, there was still the question of whether the defendant was not guilty by reason of insanity. There was clear evidence of longstanding abuse—but at whose hands? The defendant was unable to explain the head trauma her grandson endured. Using public records and notes from her own involvement in the case, Vinocour, who writes as an outlet for frustration and anger over the abuse she experienced as a child, demonstrates that insanity as a legal defense has evolved throughout the years, yet it is difficult to prove. VERDICT As a case study, this well-written book can be a companion to Alisa Roth's Insane, a comprehensive view of all sides of the issue. It will engage all readers interested in the intersection between crime and mental health.—Harry Charles, St. Louis

Library Journal

2020-01-05
A mentally ill grandmother's desperate plight exposes a deep gulf between science and the law when it comes to the insanity defense.

For two days after her 3-year-old grandson died, Dorothy Dunn (a pseudonym) slept with the boy's corpse, moving it on and off a heating grate hoping to maintain a lifelike body temperature. That and other unfathomable actions factored into the insanity defense Dunn's public defender built after a prosecutor charged the "compliant and meek," impoverished, black mother of five with second-degree murder. Debut author Vinocour—a clinical and forensic psychologist who had earlier practiced law and later served as an expert witness in Dunn's trial before a largely white jury—evaluated the defendant and found her to be mentally ill. The author reconstructs the case in a chilling book that interpolates into Dunn's tragic story a history of the insanity defense and famous related events, including the attempted assassinations of James Garfield and Ronald Reagan and the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. Insanity defense laws vary by state, but Vinocour argues persuasively that the law overall lags far behind scientific research on mental illness. A widely used legal test of insanity is whether someone knows "right" from "wrong," but mental illness is too complex for that standard, which implies falsely that "an intelligent or educated person can never be, legally, insane." Though the author has changed many "identifying details," making it uncertain that the events unfolded, as she writes, in Rochester, New York, and other pertinent facts, the story is unquestionably a page-turner, and revealing the ending would be a spoiler. It's fair to say, however, that in this case, nobody wins—except perhaps for a prosecutor later elected judge after unironically billing himself as a defender of "the highest standards of the criminal justice system."

A satisfying courtroom drama that hits the sweet spot between good storytelling and sharp legal analysis.

Kirkus Reviews