Guilty by Reason of Insanity: Inside the Minds of Killers - Softcover

Dorothy Otnow Lewis

4.07

926 ratings by Goodreads

9780804118873: Guilty by Reason of Insanity: Inside the Minds of Killers

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804118876 ISBN 13: 9780804118873

Publisher: Ivy Books, 1999

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

A psychiatrist and an internationally recognized expert on violence, Dorothy Otnow Lewis has spent the last quarter century studying the minds of killers. Among the notorious murderers she has examined are Ted Bundy, Arthur Shawcross, and Mark David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon. Now she shares her groundbreaking discoveries--and the chilling encounters that led to them.

From a juvenile court in Connecticut to the psychiatric wards of New York City's Bellevue Hospital, from maximum security prisons to the corridors of death row, Lewis and her colleague, the eminent neurologist Jonathan Pincus, search to understand the origins of violence. GUILTY BY REASON OF INSANITY is an utterly absorbing odyssey that will forever change the way you think about crime, punishment, and the law itself.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

"We met no Jimmy Cagneys or Robert Mitchums among the inmates in the prisons we visited. We found ourselves, rather, in the company of a pathetic crew of intellectually limited, dysfunctional, half-mad, occasionally explosive losers. Long before these men wound up on death row, their similarly limited, primitive, impulsive parents had raised them in the only fashion they knew.... These brutish parents had set the stage on which our condemned subjects now found themselves playing out the final act. It was a drama generations in the making."

Psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis, working in a professional partnership with neurologist Jonathan Pincus, has been steadily accumulating and publishing (in medical journals) evidence that almost all vicious criminals have some combination of (1) a childhood of abuse and/or neglect, (2) brain injuries through accident or abuse, and (3) psychotic symptoms, especially paranoia. This fascinating and well-written book, aimed at a wide audience, takes the form of a memoir in which Lewis tells us about the events that led her to study violent patients and about some of her more interesting cases, especially those on death row. Far from being another shallow "oh wow" book about conversations with horrifying killers, this is a thoughtful, humane examination of the horrible experiences that most murderers have endured, and a penetrating analysis of how subtle signs of brain damage in these people have been missed by other researchers. Lewis has an engagingly humble and personal way of writing about her experiences, which makes her findings all the more credible. --Fiona Webster

From the Back Cover:

"COMPELLING."
--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
The New York Times

"RIVETING . . . POWERFUL . . . READS LIKE A TOP-DRAWER SUSPENSE THRILLER."
--New York Post

"A REFRESHING AND COMPELLING LOOK AT THE WORKINGS OF THE CRIMINAL MIND."
--ANN RULE

"SPELLBINDING . . . A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY."
--SHERWIN B. NULAND, M.D.

"GRIPPING."
--The Boston Globe

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.