Susan Smith Trial: Insanity And Mental Illness Are Not The Same
July 16, 1995|By Bill Hendrick. and Bill Hendrick writes for The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  ATLANTA — Susan Smith's
confession doesn't even hint she was psychotic when she strapped
her two kids into her 1990 Mazda and rolled it into John D. Long
Lake. She's never been diagnosed as schizophrenic or paranoid.
Yet she's expected to insist she killed her kids, Michael, 3,
and Alex, 14 months, because she was mentally ill and couldn't
control her actions or didn't know right from wrong.  It's
certain she killed them. It's just as certain the arguments of
defense and prosecution psychiatrists about her state of mind
will make the mind-numbing DNA evidence presented at O.J.
Simpson's trial seem as simple as the ABCs.  That's because the
mind sciences are mostly theoretical-not based on physical
evidence-and thus much more open to wildly varying opinions,
even about the same person's sanity.  Jurors in the Smith trial,
which started last week in Un