Hong Kong Legal Drama – The Other Truth : An examination on the defence of mental unsoundness

I caught an episode of the 7pm Hong Kong legal drama on Channel 8 titled The Other Truth, or 真相 (pronounced zhen xiang in Chinese). In this episode, a man is being prosecuted for murder for killing his wife while in a highly emotional state brought about by provocation by the wife. Two lawyers, a man and a woman, who are the protagonists of the show, were employed to defend him in his case. They were thinking of raising the defence of temporary insanity which would acquit their client without having to have him admitted to a mental hospital if they were to raise a defence on the ground of insanity instead.

While meeting the accused at the detention centre, they tried to incite him into the same state of a fit of anger before their expert witness, a psychologist, came in to assess the accused for his psychological condition. The woman lawyer badgered the accused about the details behind the facts of his case, which managed to get him to reproduce that similar state of emotional distress. The psychologist arrived soon after, and they left the room and left their client alone with the psychologist.

The plot twist came when the psychologist came out of the detention room after his examination of the accused, and the lawyers asked him about the result of his assessment. The psychologist said that he noticed the symptoms of psychological disorder in the accused, such as the accused’s constant rubbing of his fingers. However, he says that the accused revealed to him that he acted in such a manner because he had been instructed by his lawyers to act in such a manner. And the shocker was that the lawyers actually became all silent and shifty when questioned about this by the psychologist, implicitly admitting that they indeed coaxed their client to act in such a manner to obtain an assessment of psychological disorder from the psychologist. The psychologist told the lawyers that he would reveal their unethical behavior to the judge during trial and walked off.

I would have to agree with the psychologist there that the lawyers have breached their legal code of ethics by coaxing their client to perform certain actions in order to obtain the psychological assessment they want. I have watched other legal dramas before, such as Boston Legal, where the lawyers are actually depicted as cool and smart for their unethical legal mavericks. But I think such portrayal of lawyers in the popular media further tarnishes the image of lawyers, and holds up unethical examples for lawyers-to-be. But coming back to the show, perhaps, the lawyers’ view that they had to resort to such a method reveals their lack of faith in the assessment by the psychologist to determine if their client was indeed mentally unsound. There may be reason to be skeptical about the methodology used by a psychologist to make an assessment. In the case in the show, the man was suffering a latent psychosis that only manifest under circumstances of heavy emotional distress, and it might not be reproduceable during the time which the accused is under psychological assessment. And it would be a mistake to conclude that the accused is totally mentally sound because he does not display symptoms of psychological disorder during psychological examination.

Speaking of which I would like to talk about the Tey Tsun Hang’s sex-for-grades corruption case. My post on the Tey Tsun Hang case has garnered about 1500 views on my blog according to my blogger’s traffic statistics, which is the highest hit count for a post on my blog! The majority of traffic streams in from a Sammyboy thread which features your typical ‘kay-poh’ Singaporeans interested in prying into the personal life of Tey Tsun Hang. I remember that during one stage of the Tey Tsun Hang trial, Tey, who represented himself, broke down while representing himself in court. He managed to obtain a diagnosis of anxiety disorder from a psychologist in order to defer the proceedings of the trial. The prosecutors however, claimed that Tey was feigning his anxiety illness. When they cross-examined Tey’s psychologist, the psychologist admitted that his diagnosis of his client is dependent on the answers that the client gives during psychological examination. Therefore, it suggests the possibility that an accused can misguide the psychologist if he answers the questions falsely during the psychological examination. I don’t know much about the methodology used by psychologists, so I would desist on being a cynic here. But from what I read about psychological methods so far in the news, I am a little skeptical about it and would say that it is best for those dealing with the psychology discipline to honestly reckon with its limitations.

Continuing with the drama, the male defence lawyer encountered the prosecutor in the toilet during a trial proceeding break. The defence lawyer and the prosecutor has a background history of rivalry between the two. It was in the toilet that the male defence lawyer decides to ask the prosecutor for leniency for his client on grounds that his client was mentally unsound. I really wonder whether lawyers sometimes confer with the opposing side when they encounter each other in the toilet, which seems a little comical in my opinion. The prosecutor who behaved in this really arrogant, smirkish behavior, was hell-bent on winning his case against the defence lawyer, and mocked the defence lawyer as begging him for mercy because he knows he is going to lose.

But the prosecutor’s brash, forceful antic was the one that turned on him when he cross-examined the accused back in the court room. As he badgered the accused for murdering his wife because of jealousy, the accused lost his cool and entered into a fit of rage, and although the court bailiffs tried to restrain him, he managed to walk all the way to where the prosecutor was and bit his arm. I guess the judge was presented with a cold hard evidence of the accused’s latent psychosis right before him in the court!

I studied criminal law during my first year in law school and found the topic on the various defences interesting. The defence of mental unsoundness is quite complex and convoluted in my opinion. For example, whether an accused is admitted to the mental institution depends on whether his mental unsoundness is latent or existent. If latent, he will be wholly acquitted on the ground that his psychosis is a one time off event. And then there is the doctrine of whether the psychosis is so severe as to affect the accused judgement as to what he is doing is morally wrong. And academics differ in their opinion on whether this knowledge by the accused is relevant to the defence. If I can remember clearly, there was something which I found jarring about how the defence of mental unsoundness works in Singapore. It was something about how an accused who has intention to murder, and who knows that he has a predilection for getting into a state of killing psychosis, can get himself acquitted by the defence of mental unsoundness even though he may have intended to kill his victim. So let’s say, a man can induce himself into a state of mental psychosis if he knows the stimulant that would induce himself into such a state, and then place himself in an opportune setting to kill his victim, and get away with it because he was mentally unsound. And I thought that that was just plain wrong!