The psychotic excuse

I’m returning to the same subject after a very brief time from my last article but with all the news agencies full of reports I cannot avoid it and I’m referring to the unbelievable Austrian father and the two families that grew under his tyranny. What triggered me this time was a report that his attorney is planning to ask psychiatric care for him instead of any other punishment and definitely avoid imprisonment, and to strengthen his argument he says that if the state’s specialist doesn’t confirm his psychotic status he's going to ask help from experts outside the state psychologists and psychiatrists.

When I read things like that I understand all the arguments psychologists and experts have made for the last forty years over televised series and films that show a twisted view of the investigation work. I am personally a fan of those films but I have the ability to understand and separate reality with Hollywood and by Hollywood I mean this entire fake world these series and films create. There are thousands of crimes happening every day in all the big cities all around the world. Thousands of them are solved one way or another but thousands more are not; and are not solved due to a series of reasons including state responsibility, police inability, misunderstanding or mistranslating the law and even because of luck.
But crimes are not solved in CSI laboratories, for example. CSI laboratories are there to assist the detectives in solving a crime and they work under the directions of the police. Profilers don’t transform in seconds into criminal minds that can understand how a criminal is thinking and solve crimes in hours or even worse, prevent a crime. The process to solve a crime is slow if there is no obvious proof, tracks or eye witnesses and it demands a lot of work, time and research and it is not solved in an hour’s episode including the adverts.

What happened in Austria will take time to unveil in full reality despite the fact that the crime is known, the criminal to start with confessed – doesn’t matter what his attorney says afterwards – and all the proof is there, including the results from the laboratories that proved that the man has fathered all the kids. You see, as I mentioned in my last article, in this crime the victims are not only the imprisoned daughter and her three kids but all the family including the mother and wife who was a prisoner of his the last forty years.

Social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, profilers, criminologists and any other expert you can imagine will want to examine the family and hundreds of essays are going to be written especially about the father and I’m sure somebody will base their career on this family. But for the ones who will succeed in reaching the family and the father will mean two basic things: first of all, a very slow process with countless interviews and, secondly, more seriously, these people will be interested in the 'why he did what he did' and not to prove that he is not guilty. His guilt is a fact, his crime is a fact.

Returning to the beginning and the attorney’s remark that his customer is psychotic and that his place should be in a hospital and not in a prison I turn my remarks to how much television series like "C.S.I." has twisted the way people see a crime and the investigation. I have to admit that I would never expect a remark like that from somebody who has been at least educated to understand the law and if this is his line of defense he’s hurting more his customer than helping him and finally he should stop watching so much television and start reading his law books.

The only reason a court would ever accept that defendant should be hospitalized instead of imprisoning is if the defendant cannot distinguish the difference between bad and good. This means an individual with serious brain handicap and there are cases like that where the defendant had the reactions of four or five years old. In this case the defendant knew very well the difference in such level to organize his acts a decade before actually acting. The man knew very well how to distinguish bad and good by using every possible way including his mind power over the family and his despotic behavior to hide the truth from them. He even used contemporary events the excuse of a cult where his daughter had supposedly joined, remember that the whole event is going on in mid-eighties where cults had become fear and passion for a lot of young people in central Europe. The man had every sense of good and bad and even his latest act to stop talking to the police and the investigators without the presence of his lawyer and not admitting anything shows that he’s been …watching a lot of television also!

Last and not least is the lawyer’s remark that his customer is …psychotic! The man should have done at least some research before saying that, just think how many times a day we call somebody crazy because of the way he/she drives, because the way they eat or the way they hold their handbag or newspaper. As I mentioned before if that’s his line of defense he has definitely chosen the wrong way, he has better advise his customer to admit his crimes and help the experts help a traumatized family – including his wife and his other kids – to recover at least partly of this nightmare!