I watched from my enclave at the back of the dining hall as a guard and his lumbering captive moved haltingly in my direction. The prisoner’s ankles were still shackled, as were his hands, and he was obviously having trouble maintaining his balance. This large inmate, like a clunky, unbalanced freighter, listed toward port.
When the pair reached my table, they stopped. The guard bent down, unlocked and removed the chains connecting the captive’s ankles, then rose and unlocked the handcuffs securing his arms behind his back. Docilely, the inmate placed his wrists side by side in front of him, and the guard refastened the cuffs. As he did this, the guard bent away from his prisoner and whispered in my ear, “This one’s not wrapped too tight.” As Jonathan and I would learn shortly, this guard was not a bad clinician.
Before we talk with most inmates, we already know a fair amount about them. Their attorneys have provided us with descriptions of offenses and with previous clinical reports, if they exist. But Lucky Larson’s attorney did not trust us. He feared that knowledge of his client’s bloody acts would influence our findings. How could we perform unbiased assessments if we knew that Lucky Larson had hacked not one but two victims to death? The attorney made a big mistake.
The nature of a person’s offenses provides a window into his pathology. For example, overkill—the infliction of multiple gratuitous wounds on an already dead or dying victim—which characterized Lucky’s crimes, tells much about the attacker. These assailants just can’t seem to stop. Psychotic murderers sometimes do this; their fury can reach extraordinary heights. Sometimes they respond to imagined threats to their own safety. Sometimes their “voices” tell them to keep going, to further mutilate the victim or violate the body. Sometimes they mistake their victims for other individuals in their lives—incestuous mothers, violent fathers, or taunting siblings. Manic states, too, have been associated with extremes of violence. And damage to certain parts of the brain can lead to paranoid misperceptions, impulsiveness, and extremes of emotion, especially rage. Once started on a course of action, brain-damaged killers sometimes cannot stop. Alcohol can loosen controls and may, in some people, trigger or exacerbate psychotic states. Substances such as cocaine, LSD, and PCP have been reported to distort reality at times, increase paranoia, and precipitate extraordinary violence. Jonathan and I have found that, in instances of overkill, the offender usually was psychotic, manic, or schizophrenic; had some type of brain dysfunction; was under the influence of alcohol or drugs; or suffered from some combination of the above. Criminals just out to make a fast buck don’t go on rampages.
But Lucky Larson’s lawyer was taking no chances. He kept valuable information to himself and instructed Lucky to do likewise. As a result, it took Jonathan and me weeks to piece together the facts of the case.
Eventually we learned the following: When Lucky Larson was in his early twenties, in response to a dare, he tried to rob a convenience store. (Just about all of our inmates’ careers in serious crime began in convenience stores. Convenience means different things to different people.) Lucky’s career did not progress much beyond the convenience store stage, and it was a short career at that. On this first venture he entered the store armed only with a knife. To his surprise, he was an instant success; the teenaged clerk immediately handed over the few bills and change in the till. Suddenly it occurred to Lucky that he had taken no precautions to disguise himself. The clerk would be able to identify him. (Lucky, as will become clear, had a few unmistakable physical characteristics.)
As a result of some of Lucky’s neuropsychiatric problems, whatever he thought was on the tip of his tongue and usually spilled out of his mouth; he could not resist sharing this insight into his predicament with the clerk. The clerk, cleverer by half at least than Lucky—which does not say much—assured the oafish robber that he would never disclose his identity. He supported this vow by pointing out that the store did not belong to him; he cared little what happened to the money. Besides, the clerk had no love for the police. He too, he claimed, had experienced his share of run-ins with the law. Thus reassured, Lucky made off with the meager loot, whereupon the clerk called the police and Lucky was apprehended. So much for trusting strangers. Lucky was tried, convicted, and incarcerated.
Five years later, free and again short of money, Lucky entered another convenience store. He seemed to look upon convenience stores pretty much as bankcard holders regard ATMs—a ready source of immediate cash in a pinch. But Lucky had learned a thing or two from his previous encounter. This time there would be no witnesses. As the clerk turned around to reach for a carton of cigarettes to add to the take, Lucky pulled out a knife and plunged it into his back. According to the autopsy, the first blow was fatal. Then Lucky just lost it. Once Lucky got started, there was no stopping him. No longer in danger of being identified, Lucky nevertheless continued to stab the body fifty-three more times. Then, for good measure, he cut the clerk’s throat.
Lucky Larson’s violence did not end with the murder at the convenience store. He was on a roll; some might call it a rampage. Seventy-two hours later an elderly used car dealer lay dead, his throat slashed and seventeen stab wounds on his arms and torso. The cash register was open and empty. Lucky had needed wheels and was again short of cash. We never learned exactly how this simple transaction between Lucky and the used car dealer escalated into a lethal confrontation. According to court records, the entire take from these two fatal encounters was no more than one hundred dollars and a carton of cigarettes.
Lucky Larson was apprehended and put in jail to await trial.
If his brain damage (later well documented) contributed to Lucky’s homicidal rages, his deficient reading skills contributed to his self-incrimination. Following his arrest, Lucky could not resist making a slew of phone calls on a jailhouse phone that was clearly marked “monitored.” Among his calls was one to an uncle, to whom he confessed the murders. Lucky must have heard a note of criticism in his uncle’s voice. Lucky, no dope he, detected this implicit lack of enthusiasm and got scared. Maybe his uncle would turn on him in court and testify against him. In a flash the solution came to him. No sooner had he hung up than he picked up the receiver again and called a pal, whose help he tried to enlist to bump off his uncle. All of these transactions, of course, were recorded by the sheriff’s department and used in court to convict Lucky. And the uncle, apprised of the abortive plot on his life, also testified against his nephew. Lucky was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Ever since the Supreme Court of the United States reinstated the death penalty, all capital trials have consisted of two phases. In the first phase, the jury determines the guilt or innocence of the defendant. If the defendant is found guilty, a sentencing phase follows. During this second phase of the trial, the prosecution presents what are called aggravating circumstances—all the reasons why the defendant’s crimes should be considered especially heinous and why he deserves to die. In contrast, the defense is supposed to take this opportunity to present to the jury all of the mitigating factors that can be mustered to enlist the jury’s compassion. Now is the time for the defense to invoke the culprit’s miserable childhood, his psychiatric problems, his intellectual deficiencies.
In Lucky Larson’s case, the prosecution had no difficulty bringing home to the jury the brutality of the crimes. One look at the photographs of the victims was sufficient. On the other hand, Lucky’s trial attorney felt hard pressed to come up with a single mitigating factor. A lone psychiatrist whom he had recruited prior to trial, after a brief meeting with Lucky, had dismissed him as a sociopath. A neuropsychologist who usually worked for the state tested Lucky and found “no neurological impairment at all.” She concurred with the psychiatrist. Lucky, she said, was a sociopath. As for a history of child abuse, the defendant could remember none. Lucky Larson was unlucky indeed.
I stood, smiled at the figure standing in front of me, reached for his shackled right hand, and shook it. He smiled back. Only half of his face moved. I stared at him. Then, before I could stop myself. I blurted out. “Mr. Larson, would you please smile again.” He obliged by once more crinkling up the left side of his face into what became a lopsided grimace; the right side remained flabby and immobile. I did not need Jonathan to tell me that there was something very wrong with this man neurologically. At Long Lane, the children’s neurologic signs tended to be subtle, not obvious. They had so-called soft signs. Here, before me, was definite paralysis; it was what Jonathan would call a good “hard” sign.
It seems fair to assume that a death sentence would dampen the spirits of any man. Impending execution, especially electrocution, must be a sobering event to contemplate. It would be to me. We expected to encounter in the inmates at Starke a combination of terror and depression. Such, we would learn over time, was not always the case. In fact, a few years later, just prior to one of Ted Bundy’s numerous execution dates, he waved good-bye, and in response to my look of concern, called out gaily, “Don’t worry, Dr. Lewis. It’s not going to happen!” That episode occurred during one of his manic states; he came within six hours of execution during that go-round.
Lucky Larson, like Ted Bundy, in spite of what seemed to me to be his precarious tenure on life in this world, was remarkably sanguine, even jovial. When I commented on his apparent good cheer in the face of death, Lucky Larson responded, “Fear is not one of my words. There is nothing to be afraid of in this world, especially dying.”
I know that he said this because, as he started to speak, I found myself struggling to take down everything he said verbatim. I sometimes settle for abbreviated notes; I try not to disrupt the flow of an interview with the scratching of my pen. Only when I encounter a “nobody will believe this when I tell them” situation do I strive to record exactly what is said. We were having a “nobody will believe this” exchange.
It was not just what Lucky said but the way he said it, the very atmosphere he created, that gave our meeting a surreal quality. Words tumbled out of his mouth and flew in all directions, confusing me and making it impossible to get everything down on paper. Lucky’s answers to my questions rarely targeted the topic at hand. Instead he latched on to a syllable, a word, a phrase and took off with it. Whatever came out of my mouth or his became an irresistible invitation to digress, a springboard for free association. Innocuous comments and piercing questions met with the same kinds of responses. No matter the stimulus, it invariably evoked a string of disconnected thoughts.
Sometimes even Lucky got snarled in the threads of his disorganized thought. Suddenly he would interrupt himself and ask, “Where’d I go? What was the question?” Once, in a moment of uncharacteristic insight, he volunteered, “I just get carried off into something else.”
There was no way for me to obtain a logical, sequential history from Lucky. The most I would come away with that day was a sense of his irrepressible mood and his tangled thought processes. His high spirits were not like Ted Bundy’s. Bundy’s thinking was more organized. Lucky’s garrulousness and infinite capacity to be sidetracked reminded me of the happy ramblings of a lobotomized patient I had once examined on the back ward of a state hospital during my board examinations. Then again, at times, the jocular prisoner in the handcuffs and prison garb seemed distinctly manic.
Eventually the time allotted me to examine Lucky Larson came to an end. He had exhausted me. I, in contrast, had not even slowed him down. In fact, when we parted he was more ebullient than when we began. With a certain sense of relief, I escorted the loquacious Lucky to the other side of the dining hall and deposited him in the care of Jonathan. Perhaps Jonathan would have greater success examining Lucky than I had. I decided to give myself a rest, sit back, and watch Jonathan do his thing.
Watching Jonathan Pincus try to teach Lucky Larson to skip was worth the trip to Starke. “First you hop on one foot, then on the other. While you do this you move forward,” Jonathan illustrated the task.
“O.K., now you try it.”
It took Lucky a little while to grasp the concept. Now it was the exercise itself that defeated him, an exercise any normal seven-year-old masters with ease. He could hop just fine on his right leg; it was when he tried to move forward and transfer to his left that things got rocky. His left leg gave way; it simply could not bear the weight of his entire body.
Lucky was unruffled by this defeat. Had Jonathan not terminated that task and moved on to another, Lucky would have kept trying indefinitely. He was no quitter. Failure did not dampen his spirits; rather, throughout the exercise, a steady stream of happy verbiage poured from his lips.
Eventually Jonathan and Lucky sat down to rest. “You know,” Jonathan remarked, “you have an unusually optimistic outlook on life.” No response. Perhaps Lucky did not understand him. Jonathan rephrased his comment. “As I see it, you are a pretty happy fellow for someone facing the chair.”
Now Lucky caught on. Lucky grinned his lopsided grin and proclaimed in tones audible to the rest of us in the dining hall, “I am one of those guys that doesn’t fear anybody because I can handle the situation. The car accident changed my personality. I learned that death is that simple,” and he awkwardly tried to snap the fingers of his right hand to illustrate his point. “I started living every day to its fullest. Yesterday’s done and I won’t get it again. It’s a carefree type of life,” he concluded.
Accident? I pricked up my ears, as did Jonathan. My earlier questions about his health, about whether he had ever been in any serious accidents, about cars and bikes and falls, had elicited little. Now, spontaneously, Lucky spoke of a car accident that had changed his life. Gently, trying not to distract him, Jonathan asked, “What car accident?” Jonathan had turned on the right tap and in response a torrent of relevant information spewed forth.
“When I was sixteen, maybe seventeen, I crashed my car. They told me I cut a nerve on the right side of my face. That’s why it doesn’t move.” Here was the explanation for Lucky’s skewed smile. Lucky continued.
“I broke my jaw in a couple of places. But at least I’m alive. You know I was in a coma for a few weeks. They thought I was going to die.” According to Lucky, shortly after obtaining his driver’s license, while speeding along a country road, he crashed headlong into an oncoming car. What happened to its occupants was never clear. Lucky’s head crashed into the windshield, shattering it and putting Lucky into a coma that lasted for weeks. The right side of his head took the brunt of the impact. The consequent trauma to the right side of his brain probably accounted for his left-sided weakness and the overall list toward port that I had noticed. The shattered glass had transected his facial nerve, making it impossible for him ever again to move the right side of his face. Medical records that we subsequently acquired indicated that the doctors who saved Lucky’s life required two hundred stitches just to patch up what remained of his face. His left foot and right collarbone had also been shattered.
Jonathan is a good detective. Amid the scarred flesh and underlying shattered bone of the right side of Lucky’s face, he noticed another abnormality. Lucky’s right eye, which was sunken in its socket, was smaller than his left. It was also blind. Therefore, Jonathan deduced, the car accident was not the first trauma to the right side of Lucky’s brain. This small, blind eye had to reflect a much earlier trauma. The eye, Jonathan explained to me later, is an extension of the brain. An injury severely impeding the growth of one eye would have to have occurred very early in development. Lucky’s left eye was of normal size; it had grown at a normal rate along with the left side of his brain. The right, in contrast, must have been injured in utero, at birth, or in very early infancy. The medical records would prove Jonathan’s deduction correct. Lucky Larson had been the product of a traumatic forceps delivery. According to Jonathan, Lucky’s left-sided weakness probably did result from the car accident that injured the right side of his brain when he was sixteen years old. His left limbs were normal in size and were in proportion to the rest of his body. They were not withered, as they would have been had their nerve supply been compromised at birth. They were just weaker than normal.
Jonathan is thorough. His careful examination revealed that the left side of Lucky Larson’s brain, as well as the right, had not been totally spared. Although Lucky was right-handed, wrote with it, caught with it, stabbed with it, Jonathan discovered that his coordination on the right was poorer than on the left. Each side of the brain controls the musculature of the opposite side of the body. Therefore, difficulty manipulating the right hand can result from left-brain lesions.
Lucky Larson’s abnormal reflexes confirmed Jonathan’s suspicion of damage to both sides of his brain. Jonathan ran a tongue depressor along the outside of the sole of Lucky’s left foot. His toes, instead of curling under in a normal response, extended upward and splayed out, like a fan. Jonathan next ran the wooden stick along the outside of Lucky’s right sole. As on the left, his big toe rose while the remaining four fanned upward and outward. Jonathan repeated the examination twice more on each side, each time recreating a fan of toes. “Bilateral Babinski signs,” he jotted in his notes. This abnormal reflex reflected injury to both right and left cortico-spinal tracts—nerve pathways that extend from the cerebral cortex, through the middle and lower sections of the brain where they cross, and down each side of the spinal cord. Jonathan had elicited another hard sign of central nervous system damage.
In spite of the attorney’s failure to trust us and share with us essential information, and in spite of Lucky Larson’s inability to string two coherent sentences together, Jonathan and I had managed to glean important insights into some of the reasons why Lucky Larson had killed, indeed overkilled, the hapless young clerk and the unsuspecting car dealer. His illogical thought processes, his poor contact with reality, his manic exuberance, and most of all, his demonstrable brain damage were all relevant to issues of mitigation. All had been present at the time of his initial trial, but for some reason, nobody had noticed them. Now, thanks to our evaluations, the attorney had something to run with. He could put the findings before a judge and try to convince the judge to give Lucky a new trial. And that is exactly what the lawyer did.
Lucky’s attorney did not win a new trial for his client. He did manage to convince the judge that Lucky was deserving of a new sentencing hearing. Not only did the judge, an intelligent, fair-minded gentleman, agree to a new sentencing hearing, but he also gave the attorney the wherewithal to document further Lucky’s abnormalities. He acceded to Jonathan’s request that an EEG (electroencephalogram) and an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) of Lucky’s brain be obtained and, at my request, ordered a battery of sophisticated neuropsychological tests. Most important, Lucky’s attorney also came away with adequate funds for an investigator to help him find and interview family members and search records. Thus, if Lucky could not provide a history, perhaps a combination of family informants and records could.
The first results to come in were from the EEG lab. Lucky’s brain waves were “diffusely abnormal.” This was not big news. Lots of normally functioning individuals have diffusely abnormal brain waves. Still, it was a step in the right direction. When the MRI results came in, showing distinct scarring in both frontal lobes, we had hard, visible evidence of severe brain injury. Lucky’s car accident had resulted in the equivalent of bilateral frontal lobotomies.
The investigator, too, struck gold. He managed to track down one of Lucky’s brothers, Frank, who until recently had been living a thousand miles from Starke with his wife and children. As fate would have it, shortly before the investigator made contact with Frank, his children had been removed from his home by court order. It seems that Frank had been sexually molesting them and teaching them to molest each other. The question was, where had Frank learned these practices?
The investigator, a real pro when it came to digging up dirt people did not want you to uncover, somehow managed to get hold of the social service records of Frank’s case. (Investigators have ways of gleaning confidential information that would make any citizen of this country uneasy. Jonathan and I have learned when not to ask where or how certain information has been obtained. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” seems to be the motto not only of the army but also of the best investigators in the field.) Frank’s records provided our first glimpse into the secrets of Lucky’s childhood. A picture of life in the Larson household emerged.
Lucky was the oldest of four children and was his mother’s favorite. So favored was he, in fact, that when he was six years old she taught him to pleasure her. Lucky is no doubt one of the youngest boys ever to master the art of cunnilingus. Frank could describe this to his social service worker because he often watched. Sometimes, however, Frank and the younger children were locked out of the house in order to give Lucky and his mother privacy. When Lucky’s mother tired of his attentions to her, she would force Lucky, Frank, and the other children in the house to perform sexual acts on each other. Now we knew the origin of Frank’s predilection for sex games with young children.
Although Lucky was his mother’s favorite, he paid for this exalted position by becoming the focus of his stepfather’s wrath. Lucky’s mother had always insisted that this man, who fiercely beat Lucky, was Lucky’s biological father, but Lucky always suspected he was not; the stepfather knew for sure that he was not. Once, Frank recalled, when Lucky was being chased by his stepfather, Lucky scrambled up a tree to escape. Thereupon the stepfather chopped down the tree with an axe and captured the terrified child. Without this information from Frank and from his social service records, we would never have known of the extraordinary abuse, sexual and physical, that Lucky had endured at the hands of his mother and stepfather. Lucky just did not remember. Frank and his records had provided the missing pieces to the puzzle of Lucky’s extraordinary violence. I often think back to this case, and to dozens like it, when I read articles asserting that there is no such thing as a repressed memory. When we evaluated Lucky Larson, though we were aware of the concept of repression, Jonathan and I had no idea of the extent to which memories like these could be submerged, hidden from conscious awareness, and still influence behavior.
I was pleased with the results of our evaluation. There was a strong case to be made for mitigation, and I was prepared to help Lucky’s attorney make it. Jonathan, on the other hand, had qualms. His eldest son, against Jonathan’s wishes, had worked the “graveyard shift” at a convenience store in New Haven and had twice been robbed by drunken, gun-wielding thugs. The night before testifying, as Jonathan studied the photographs of Lucky’s crimes, tears welled up at the sight of the clerk’s corpse, lying facedown on the floor of the convenience store. To Jonathan, he looked so young and innocent, his obviously stacked shoes betraying his adolescent efforts to appear taller and older. As in Lee Anne’s case, Jonathan worried. Suppose his testimony helped release Lucky into the population; suppose Lucky killed again. The blood would be on Jonathan’s hands.
The attorney quickly reassured us both that nothing we said would ever cause Lucky Larson to be returned to society. The most the attorney would ask or could hope for was that Lucky’s life be spared, that he be permitted to live out his remaining years in the prison at Starke. His highest possible aspiration could be to become a trusty and be allowed to polish the white linoleum corridors of the prison. He would never again be on the outside.
Sensing Jonathan’s continued reluctance to testify, the attorney turned to him and said simply, “Tell me now if you cannot, not tomorrow in court.” Jonathan took a deep breath and resolved then and there to go ahead, take the stand, and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
The next day, I took the stand first. Psychiatry, as every prosecutor who has ever cross-examined me has never hesitated to point out, is a “soft” discipline compared with the “harder” medical discipline of, say, neurology. The difference between neurology and psychiatry is analogous in some ways to the difference between hard neurologic signs and soft neurologic signs. Hard neurologic signs can be demonstrated easily and often point to localized brain damage. The patient cannot move a limb; he lacks sensation in a particular area of his body; the MRI shows an abnormal mass in the brain; the EEG shows localized spike and wave complexes. In other words, evidence of brain damage is clear. Soft signs, demonstrated by certain abnormal reflexes, by peculiar hand movements, by coordination problems, can also be indicative of severe impairment. People with soft signs can actually have tiny hemorrhages scattered throughout their brains. The lesions may severely impair functioning; they just can’t be localized. Similarly, a person with psychiatric problems can experience a myriad of symptoms, including hallucinations, delusions, and strange feelings of being possessed. These are found in the most severe psychotic disorders. However, these symptoms, like soft signs, cannot be localized in the brain or documented biochemically through laboratory tests. They are subjective, their existence revealed only in the course of a sensitive interview. The psychiatrist cannot prove their existence.
Judges and juries are not the only skeptics when it comes to psychiatric findings. Other doctors also have trouble accepting their existence. For example, the pediatrician at Long Lane had trouble with them. When Jonathan and I worked at Long Lane, we encountered a number of adolescents who hallucinated. Several had visual hallucinations, saw things that were not there; others heard voices that frightened them or told them how to act; a few experienced both auditory and visual hallucinations.
Jonathan and I were reluctant to make use of antipsychotic medications. There are a host of reasons why one must be especially careful with these kinds of drugs. However, from time to time they were required and we prescribed them. This put us at odds with the institution’s pediatrician, Dr. Delbert.
I recall Jonathan’s account of locking horns with Dr. Delbert, who had precipitously discontinued the medication we had prescribed for a psychotic child. As Jonathan recounted his telephone conversation with Dr. Delbert, it went something like this:
“Doctor Pincus, I am discontinuing the Mellaril you prescribed for Andrew.”
“Why are you doing that, Doctor Delbert?”
“I see nothing that leads me to think he has visual hallucinations. I hear nothing from him indicating he suffers from auditory hallucinations. I am, therefore, stopping the medication.”
“But, Doctor Delbert, it is the patient, not the doctor, who sees things that are not there. It is the patient, not the doctor, who hears the voices.”
As I recall, we lost that round. Dr. Delbert discontinued the antipsychotic drug and Andrew reentered his world of threatening hallucinations. Shortly thereafter he bit the thumb of a shift supervisor.
I accepted the fact that my account of Lucky’s rambling, illogical thought processes and inordinate exuberance in the teeth of death would probably not impress the resentencing jury. Too soft. Too subjective a set of observations. But surely the tales of brutality and incest could not help but move them. The very fact that Lucky had never invoked them, that he had actually forgotten or repressed them, could be expected to carry some weight. After all, were it not for Frank and for his social service records, the abuse that Lucky had endured throughout childhood would have remained hidden. No one could accuse Lucky of fabricating an abusive past in order to manipulate the jury.
The attorney saved his best ammunition for last: Jonathan. Jonathan is an impressive witness. He exudes a confidence that springs from having a six-foot-two frame, a tenured professorship (then at Yale, now at Georgetown), and expertise in an area that, at least in the field of medicine, could pass as a relatively hard discipline. The running joke has always been that neurologists are superb at identifying what is wrong with a patient; they just can’t do much about it. In Lucky’s case, Jonathan could show the jury exactly where the lesions were that paralyzed the right side of his face and weakened the left side of his body. Using a slide of the MRI of Lucky’s brain, Jonathan could even point out where his frontal lobes lost contact with the rest of his brain, preventing Lucky from exercising control over his aggressive feelings. Jonathan described for the jury how Lucky’s devil-may-care attitude, so inappropriate to his current situation, reflected these neuroanatomical discontinuities. The lesions between the cortex of the frontal lobes and the rest of the central nervous system, between the self-reflective portions and the more instinctual portions of the brain, also contributed to Lucky’s episodic violence. In some ways, his actions were like those of a decorticate cat. When the cortex of a cat is separated surgically from the rest of the brain, leaving only the lower centers of the brain intact, the cat may at first glance appear normal. In fact, it will purr and respond positively to affection. However, its responses to stimuli that ordinarily would cause expressions of mild discomfort or annoyance are no longer moderated by the frontal cortex. The decorticate animal, when stimulated, becomes ferocious, directing its attack at anything it perceives as threatening or uncomfortable. The fifty-four knife wounds that Lucky inflicted on the store clerk were the expression of a limbic system (that part of the brain we have in common with the denizens of Reptile Land) released from higher cortical control. Human beings, like other animals, require the modulating influences of their frontal lobes if they are to function in a civilized way. Lucky, Jonathan argued, could not and should not be held completely accountable for behaviors beyond his control.
The evidence of Lucky’s neurologic damage was strong. Any judge, any juror could recognize his impairment even at a distance. They could see his contorted smile, his sunken, atrophied right eye, his awkward, lumbering gait. The physical and sexual abuse he had endured was also convincing, especially because Lucky had never tried to use it in his own defense. He never even remembered it. Never before (or since) have Jonathan and I testified in a case in which there was clearer evidence of injury to the brain and of its behavioral consequences. Never have we had better objective evidence of extreme physical and sexual abuse. If ever there were a case in which mitigating factors existed and could be demonstrated, this was it. We left the courthouse pleased with our work.
We were astounded. In spite of Lucky’s lobotomized brain, his paralyzed face, and his brutal and incestuous upbringing, the jury saw fit once more to sentence him to death. As we reflected on the situation, the only comfort we could find was in our knowledge that the very lesions that separated Lucky’s frontal lobes from the rest of his brain and caused him to act ferociously also protected him from appreciating the reality of his situation and kept him in perpetual good spirits.