Like Mother, Like Son by William Flanagan

Author:William Flanagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-05-19T16:00:00+00:00

19

If Vicki Ardito was feigning mental illness, it was an Oscar-winning performance. For years, she was able to convince teams of psychiatrists that she was emotionally unable to defend herself in court.

Of course her chief prosecutor, Gerald Sullivan, and her trial judge, Thomas Stark, never believed it for a minute. But this was the late seventies, the high-water mark of psychiatrists’ clout in the criminal justice system. They were the social science geniuses of the moment, and their explanations and rationalizations of why good people did bad things carried a lot of weight with juries and liberal judges. Terrible acts committed by normally sane and sober people were aberrational, they maintained, and could somehow be explained or excused. Something must have snapped. The individual was not really responsible for the crime; her husband, or mother, or father, or environment, or even the consumption of a Twinkie, could be the cause. Blame was placed everywhere but on the culprit, and victims were forgotten.

If you had any kind of talent at all, your crime—even murder—could simply be pardoned. In 1981 Norman Mailer went on a crusade to free a killer named Jack Abbott. Writers do this periodically—take up the cudgels for the “wrongfully convicted;” it enhances their reputations.

There was no doubt Abbott was a killer—he had killed an inmate in prison. But he could string sentences together and had written powerful letters to Mailer. Mailer, who himself had once jabbed one of his ex-wives with a small knife, crusaded to get him paroled. He has had blood on his hands ever since.

Thanks at least in part to the author, Abbott was set free. Abbott became the darling of the liberal literary set, more impressed with his powers of description than destruction. Yet he had clearly telegraphed what his next move would be, in his grisly book titled In the Belly of the Beast, in which he describes the “gentleness of the feeling at the center of a coarse act of murder.” Abbott was not long out of prison before he relieved that sick feeling. He stabbed to death a young immigrant waiter outside a food shop on Second Avenue. His literary talents notwithstanding, Abbott was returned to jail.

Mailer was apologetic. “My culpability was assuming I was the one who was in danger. And I wasn’t. The one who was in danger was the first stranger who cut across his bow in the wrong way. It’s a sad, sad, sad, sour story.”

But it was a liberal era, and establishment norms about crime and punishment and accountability were being attacked. The psychiatrists had an explanation for almost everything, and the courts listened. And money could buy a roomful of experts—who would happily dance to the tune of the purchaser. They were like Vicki’s chimpanzees, performing for bananas.

It was Vicki’s hope that eventually she would walk out of a mental institution—not to stand trial, but as a free woman. All she had to do was convince the psychiatrists that she had been insane, by their own definition, when she had Mattana killed.

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