igger child,” telling a jail psychologist she hoped to ignite a race war.
But as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, Cromer’s attorney argued that “his client killed because she is consumed by schizophrenic paranoia —not hate for blacks.” Or as the lawyer put it, “This case does not involve racism; it involves insanity.” To help undermine this claim, the prosecutor enlisted the assistance of Szasz, the iconoclastic psychiatrist famous for rejecting the insanity defense, involuntary commitment, and the very concept of mental illness. At the trial, Szasz explained the difference between a medical diagnosis and a psychiatric diagnosis: “Medical diagnoses deal with objective and demonstrable lesions of the body, broken bones, diseased livers, kidneys, and so on. Psychiatric diagnoses deal with behaviors that human beings display, and they have to be interpreted in moral, cultural, and legal terms and, therefore, different interpreters will arrive at different judgments.” He pointed out that “homosexuality was recognized as a mental disease until a few years ago” and that smoking, previously considered a habit, had recently been classified as a mental disorder.
Asked “what [Cromer] was suffering from, if anything,” on the day of the murder, Szasz offered the following opinion based on her records: “She was suffering from the consequences of having lived a life very badly, very stupidly, very evilly.…From the time of her teens, for reasons which I don’t know…whatever she [has] done, she has done very badly. She was a bad student.…She was a bad wife. She was a bad mother. She was a bad employee insofar as she was employable. Then she started to engage [in taking] illegal drugs, then she escalated to illegal assault, and finally she committed this murder.…Life is a task. You either cope with it or it gets you.…If you do not know how to build, you can always destroy.”
Szasz did not really try to explain why Cromer killed Reginald. Indeed, the main strength of his testimony was his acknowledgment of how difficult it is to get inside the head of a criminal—or anyone else. Cromer was the way she was and did the things she did “for reasons I don’t know.” By contrast, the defense experts confidently asserted that her crime was caused by a mental illness.
In Szasz Under Fire, a new collection of exchanges with his critics, Szasz, a Reason contributing editor and an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, explains why, unlike the defense experts, he did not conduct a “psychiatric examination” of Cromer. “I regard the practice as the epitome of junk science and refuse to participate in it,” he writes. Not only is there “no objective test for mental illness,” but psychiatrists are supposed to determine a defendant’s state of mind at the time of the crime by talking to him many months later, a pretense Szasz considers “prima facie absurd.” This was one of the main points he made in his testimony, which was condemned by psychiatrists outraged that he had dared to question the premises of their profession. The jurors, who convicted Cromer, apparently agreed with Szasz about the reliability of psychiatric testimony.
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