Park Elliot Dietz (born August 13, 1948) is a forensic psychiatrist who has consulted or testified in many of the highest-profile US criminal cases, including those of spousal killer Betty Broderick, mass murderer Jared Lee Loughner, and serial killers Joel Rifkin, Arthur Shawcross, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Kaczynski, Richard Kuklinski, the D.C. sniper attacks, and William Bonin.
He came to national prominence in 1982 during his five days of testimony as the prosecution's expert witness in the trial of John Hinckley Jr., for his attempted assassination of President Reagan on March 30, 1981. Then an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Dietz testified that at the time of the shooting, Hinckley knew what he was doing, knew it was wrong, and had the capacity to control his behavior thus was not legally insane. He heads a forensic consulting firm, Park Dietz & Associates.
Early life and education
Dietz was born on August 13, 1948, and raised in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Harrisburg. His mother, Marjorie Dietz, who had trained as a nurse and did hospital volunteer work including activities at a local mental institution. His father, Raymond Dietz, was a physician, as was Dietz's grandfather.
Dietz graduated from Camp Hill High School in 1966 and that same year enrolled at Cornell University to major in Psychology and Biology. He was a member of Cornell's Theta Delta Chi fraternity. In 1970 he graduated with an A.B. cum laude in Psychology, and was a Phi Beta Kappa.
In 1970, Dietz received a senatorial scholarship to study at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, transferring in 1972 to Johns Hopkins University. There, he was among a handful of students in the M.D.-Ph.D. Program in Behavioral Sciences funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the Grant Foundation of New York. From 1972 to 1975, while completing medical school and course requirements for a Ph.D. in Social Relations, Dietz also earned a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree.
Early career
After completing his residency in general psychiatry at Johns Hopkins in 1977 and fellowship in forensic psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978, Dietz began teaching at Harvard Medical School, where at age 29 he was the school's youngest assistant professor. While teaching at Harvard, Dietz also was the director of forensic psychiatry at Bridgewater State Hospital, a facility for the criminally insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. and was promoted to Professor of Law in the School of Law and Professor of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry in the School of Medicine.
Significant contributions
Dr. Dietz has authored over 100 publications and consulted and/or testified in hundreds of criminal and civil cases. In addition to academic positions, Dr. Dietz has held hospital and administrative appointments; served on institutional committees, national public policy task forces, editorial boards for peer-reviewed scientific journals, and as a technical advisor for numerous TV series and films.
In 2010, Dietz was awarded the "Seymour Pollack Award for Distinguished Contributions to Education in Forensic Psychiatry" by the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. sexual masochism, sex offenses against children, exhibitionism, and sex offenses generally. Additionally, Dr. Dietz has authored many works on workplace violence, the stalking of high-profile individuals, and forensic psychiatry as a discipline.
John Hinckley Jr. trial
John W. Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Reagan outside Washington, D.C.'s Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981, and Hinckley's 1982 trial included Dietz as an expert prosecution witness (while he still was teaching at Harvard). In his five days of testimony, Dietz told the jury that Hinckley told him that he felt shooting the president accomplished his goal of trying to impress actress Jodie Foster. Dietz quoted Hinckley as saying, Actually, I should feel good because I accomplished everything on a grand scale ... I did it for [Foster's] sake.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Adelman, the chief prosecutor, argued that Hinckley may have been emotionally unstable at the time of the shooting, but that he was not so mentally disturbed that he could not understand what he did when he shot Reagan. Dietz and the colleagues whom he led wrote the prosecution's 628-page report on Hinckley's mental state.
Dietz used Hinckley's assessment of the assassination location, as Reagan walked outside the Hilton Hotel, as an example of how Hinckley did, "appreciate the wrongfulness", of his actions, but nonetheless went forward. After eight weeks of testimony, the jury on June 21, 1982, found Hinckley not guilty on all 13 counts by reason of insanity, a verdict that so shocked the nation that Senator Arlen Specter held a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee to question the jurors and both the American Psychiatric Association and American Bar Association appointed task forces to work on a revised test of insanity to clarify federal law.
The trial catapulted Dietz into the national spotlight: attorneys took special note of his unique knowledge of deviant behavior, with the FBI also seeking his expertise. His concurrent teaching at the University of Virginia from 1982 to 1988 ended with Dietz moving to Southern California to start his forensic consulting firm. During his two days of testimony, Dietz explained to the jury that Dahmer was not insane or driven to commit murder but, instead, had sexual disorders and exhibited sexually deviant behavior with his victims, but purposely drank himself to the point of intoxication when he killed. Dahmer, he said, also kept the skulls of 11 of his victims: far from being insane, Dietz said Dahmer, calmly and rationally, knew that keeping, "some of his favorite items, these keepsakes, [meant taking] a very big risk of being detected for all these serious crimes."
Dietz was impressed at how Dahmer remembered intricate details of each murder. The two men watched some of Dahmer's cinematic favorites including Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, The Exorcist III, plus gay pornography.
Dahmer also gave Dietz plans for a temple he wanted to build for most of the 11 victims' skulls that he kept, with plans to paint them.
The Unabomber
The "Unabomber" terrorist Ted Kaczynski injured 23 people and killed three more using homemade bombs from 1978 to 1995. Kaczynski pleaded guilty to all federal charges including murder just after his 1998 trial began: though Dietz was unable to interview him before that for federal prosecutors, the psychiatrist did read his journals, interviewed those who knew him, and reviewed all of the evidence gathered by investigators. Kaczynski's writings, he said in an interview with The New Yorker magazine, "scream geek, not schizophrenic", contrary to the defense team's psychiatric evaluation of Kaczynski as a paranoid schizophrenic. "They're full of strong emotions, considerable anger, and an elaborate, closely reasoned system of belief about the adverse impact of technology on society", Dietz said. "The question always is: is that belief system philosophy or is it delusion? The answer has more to do with the ideology of the psychiatrist than with anything else."
Andrea Yates
Dietz attracted considerable controversy following his testimony in the 2002 trial of Andrea Yates, a woman convicted of drowning her five children in a bathtub. Dietz was the prosecution's lone mental health expert, and testified that shortly before Yates committed the crime, the television crime drama franchise Law & Order had aired an episode about a woman who drowned her children and was found innocent by reason of insanity. However, no such Law & Order episode exists. When the error became known, Yates' murder conviction was overturned by an appeals court, on January 6, 2005. The negative publicity following the Yates trial led Dietz to be dropped as an expert from Marcus Wesson's murder trial.
Waco
As the Waco siege went on, on April16, 1993, FBI Director William Sessions tried to convince Attorney General Janet Reno to approve an assault on the complex, but she requested more documentation.
After Dietz prepared a written opinion stating that further negotiations were not likely to resolve the crisis, and that Koresh would likely continue abusing the children, that Attorney General Reno, who was known as a child advocate, approved the assault on April17, 1993.
The Meese Commission
Dietz was one of 12 people appointed in 1985 to President Reagan's Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, better known as The Meese Report after then-U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese. The commission's final, 1,960-page, five-part, 35-chapter, report was published in July 1986. At the University of Virginia law school library's special collection department, the inventory of Dietz's papers includes 16 boxes dedicated solely to his work on the commission, covering a broad range of sexuality issues from nude sunbathing to bondage publications and Playboy magazine cartoons plus one box bearing a title with the now-antiquated phrase, "dial-a-porn".
In his personal statement in the commission's report, Dietz contrasted his commission work with his many years of studying the psychopathic behavior of killers, writing that when he joined the commission, "the morality of pornography was the farthest thing from my mind ... Thus, I was astonished to find that by the final meeting of the Commission, pornography had become a matter of moral concern to me. While other Commissioners may have learned things about the dark side of life that they had never known, I remembered something about the higher purposes of life and of humanity's aspirations that I had forgotten during too many years working on the dark side."
Dietz also stated in the final report, "In my opinion, we know enough now to be confident in asserting that a population exposed to violent pornography is a population that commits more acts of sexual brutality than it otherwise would and to suggest somewhat less confidently that the same is probably true of a population exposed to degrading pornography."
Meese Commission's 8-Point "Medical and Public Health" Problems Involving Pornography
Dietz's extensive commission statement outlined eight areas in which pornography creates, or helps foster, "a medical and public health problem". Surveying these issues, Dietz wrote, in part:
- On pornography impacting social behavior: "The person who follows the patterns of social behavior promoted by pornography is a person for whom love, affection, marriage, procreation, and responsibility are absolutely irrelevant to sexual conduct."
- Shaping personal attitudes that create adverse health consequences: "even in experimental samples of mentally stable male college students, exposure to violent pornography leads to measurable, negative changes in the content of sexual fantasies, attitudes toward women, attitudes toward rape, and aggressive behavior within the experimental setting".