The Annual Merton Society Lecture
'Child Abuse, Psychopathy, and the Risk of Future Violence: A Case of Reversed Mitigation in Capital Cases'
The Annual Merton Society Lecture, with guest speaker Dr Chloé Deambrogio, Junior Research Fellow in Law.
During her talk, Chloé discussed an extract from her forthcoming book, Judging Insanity, Punishing Difference: A History of Mental Illness in the Criminal Court. Drawing on unpublished trial records, the book explores how developments in the field of forensic psychiatry shaped Texas courts’ assessments of defendants’ mental health and criminal responsibility in death penalty cases spanning the 20th century. In her presentation, Chloé focused on cases tried in the 1980s and 1990s, a period characterized by a growing attention to the potential links between child abuse and future violence and by a regular use of the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder to label capital defendants in Texas courts.
