In college I took one introductory psychology course. Friends told me this was a very good course to take if I wanted to be a lawyer someday. I didn't know why. I knew nothing of law and had no way to relate the things I studied to the future practice of law.
It was years before I understood that law IS psychology. Prosecutors practice psychology without a license when they argue that the alleged bad guy knew he'd committed evil because he ran from the police, disregarding the well-known cultural fact that some innocent folk flee from the police because they know the police all too well. Conflicts in psychology make horse races.
Jury instructions are the black-letter law of psychology. As a rape prosecutor I always girded myself for the Lord Hale cautionary instruction advising the jury that rape accusations are easy to make and difficult to defend against no matter how innocent the man might be.
The women's movement eliminated the Hale instruction, but I'd always felt that it represented a certain reality: some women will make up a story to cover up what really happened, when what really happened was inconvenient, such a getting caught having consensual sex, or with the wrong person, pregnancy, fear of pregnancy, or some quite unimaginable motive that remains a mystery unless the woman confesses, such as in the "I Owe You a Lunch" story that I'll present at a later time.
I felt that this so-called Lord Hale instruction represented the accumulated wisdom of courts fed up with hanging innocent men on the uncorroborated word of secretly motivated women in too many cases.
We don't permit convictions on the uncorroborated word of accomplices. It's too easy for a guilty person to say, "Let me go and I'll give you the real culprit," and then name YOU. Police are always interested in the real culprit, of course, and are usually willing to cut a deal so long as they believe there exists in the pool of usual suspects a bigger fish. So we have a rule against it. Accomplices don't have as powerful a lobby as women, however, so while the uncorroborated testimony of accomplices is not allowed to convict, the uncorroborated testimony of aggrieved or manipulated women and children is.
There is, of course, a significant difference between accomplices and other witnesses. Accomplices know they did something wrong. Women and children are more likely to be victims who have done nothing wrong except to be too near, too long, with an abusive person.
There are exceptions, however, and it requires a competent investigation, conducted with integritey, to distinguish a righteous victim from a vindictive prevaricator or a manipulated child. Since liars and pawns are seen with unfortunate frequency, and the real victims, the falsely accused, are too often sent to prison, it takes a special effort to get at the truth. The accused is often discounted as a truth-teller. "He's in denial," believers in the accusation claim. Maybe, maybe not. How are you going to tell?
You must rely on the only tool we have available to us, called reason. Reason depends on facts disclosed through investigation. The legal system, the criminal justice system, the medical system, are all built on the tool of reason. We often see junk-reason, using junk-psychology, however. The result is a false conviction, also called a miscarriage of justice.
I want to see the accumulated wisdom of the courts brought to bear on our law. I thought, as a youngster, that this is what the law did. I was wrong. Our law tends to perpetuate the causes of mistakes, not admit and prevent them, I'm sorry to have to say after swimming for so many years in a not-very-pure stream. Corrections come only slowly, sporadically, and against considerable opposition. See the false death penalty and rape convictions we read about with such frequency.
Psychology.
Some psychology has a political force behind it, other psychology doesn't.
King Solomon, of Cut-the-Baby-in-Half reknown, was using psychology. As a Domestic Relations judge he became famous. He figured that the real mother in the custody dispute between two single women of ill-repute (living together, one had a baby, no husband, etc.) would give up the baby to spare it from the sword while the jealous wannabe mom wouldn't. Good guess on Sol's part, wouldn't you say? He must've been around.
Which brings me to why I wanted to talk about psychology.
My wife and I were on a lovely weeklong cruise to the Greek Islands in the Aegean Sea. Each night at dinner we'd meet a new couple or two, American usually. Americans don't feel they know each other unless we know what the other does for a living. Other cultures may find this offensive, but not us.
Having served as a prosecuting attorney for seven years, followed by a private practice which includes a considerable amount of criminal defense work, the easy thing to do was to say that I'm a criminal defense attorney.
Saying "I'm a criminal defense attorney" creates more negative vibes than it allays. Criminal defense attorneys have been termed the proctologists of the legal profession, as though there was something wrong with being a proctologist. I guess the medical profession has their hierarchy, too. The lower-you-go the lower-you-are-sort of thing. If my backside were hurting I wouldn't be looking for a brain surgeon, although on second thought...
I needed to describe what I do in a way that didn't kill the conversation. I suppose if I'd met a CPA on the cruise I could say I represent crooked CPAs, but I don't think that would advance the conversation very much either.
"I represent people who have legal problems because they have psychological problems," I said the next evening on meeting new dinner guests.
"Oh, really, what does that mean?" was the response and we were off to a very nice conversation about the foibles of human nature that unfolded like a tragedy occurring in Greek waters. Everybody knows of someone who's had legal problems because of psychological problems, theirs or someone else's.
So psychology is important in law and life.
So important that you don't have to go to school to learn it. Psychology is us. I've known people with no higher education, no education at all, in some cases (I'm thinking of some of the notorious Gypsies I've encountered) who will eat the lunch of the best trained psychologist I can imagine. It would be no contest. The accursed money would be burned or buried every time.
I love the Gypsies, make that the idea of Gypsies. See La Gitanilla the Cervantes story featuring Preciosa. But not in any literal sense; you would not ever want to be a Gypsy. But the Roma do have a unique set of survival skills. Compare them with another group of long-term survivors against oppression having a totally different attitude and skill-set, Jewish people, a group in which I have a significant stake as a matter of fact, the People-of-the-Book.
Gypsy culture has no books, no writings, no graphic representations to speak of. They do have an oral tradition of music, dance and story-telling that has kept tribe and culture alive for a thousand years and more against similar oppression (Hitler practiced on the Gypsies before perfecting his technique for use against the Jews), with no ability to read.
How do the Roma (the true name for Gypsies, short for Egyptians, which they're not, but that's another long story) do that? It's a fascinating story but well worth delving into, which I felt compelled to do in Foxglove, the poison-murder conspiracy case against a real Gypsy princess that lacked poison and murder. One of my prized possessions, a Foxglove souvenir, is the genuine crystal ball on my credenza, a gift from a grateful Romany client.
I only resort to the crystal ball on special occasions, however. It's far too powerful for the ordinary "How will this case turn out" question, so I must advise clients that crystal-balling comes at a decided premium.
You don't have to be a Gypsy to practice the old boojo, psychology for fun and profit...
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