The Criminal Mind by Dr Duncan Harding: No excuses… most criminals really ARE to blame

The Criminal Mind by Dr Duncan Harding (Michael Joseph £25, 400pp)

This book opens with the case of Liam, a privileged 17-year-old who drowned his aunt after his family confiscated his phone and she refused to give it back.

Forensic psychiatrist Dr Duncan Harding, who often serves as an expert witness in trials, is called upon by the prosecution to argue that Liam should bear full responsibility, because he committed the crime in a clear state of mind. 

The defence insist that he was psychotic when he killed his aunt, so shouldn’t shoulder all the blame.

The evidence seems to indicate that Liam was thinking alarmingly cogently: after killing his aunt, he rang 999 and politely told the call handler what he’d done. 

He even offered up the number plate of his aunt’s car, to help the authorities reach him with minimum hassle.

But as happens more than once in Harding’s riveting memoir, the jury finds Liam guilty only of manslaughter, with diminished responsibility.

Those on the jury just couldn’t bring themselves to believe that a child could coolly murder one of their family members, Harding concludes: they found it easier to attribute Liam’s act to mental illness, rather than to his own choices.

Unlike other forensic psychiatrists he has worked alongside, Harding doesn’t believe that people who do terrible things – rape, maim, kill – are necessarily mentally ill. 

Violence and cruelty are unfortunately part of the human condition. And though he notes that many psychopaths he’s come across have similar back stories – they were raised in crime-ridden homes; they were neglected as children – he believes that ‘as a society we can’t assume that extreme behaviours result solely from illness or trauma, however incomprehensible they may appear’.

Harding himself came from the kind of background that could well have preceded a life of criminality.

He grew up amid ‘cruelty, abuse and poverty’. His father regularly beat him and his mother would punch him in the head even when he was very small. They divorced when Harding was five; after that, his mother raised him single-handedly.

Though not violent, she clearly struggled: she had polio and would often tell her son, as he was setting off for school, that she intended to kill herself that day.

It was rare, Harding recalls, that he would come home without expecting to find his mother’s body somewhere in the house. 

Most psychiatrists he met had enjoyed comfortable childhoods, ‘very different from the childhoods of the offenders they worked with.

And also, very different from mine. Maybe that explains why I saw things differently.’ He was proof that style of upbringing ‘did not necessarily lead to crime. 

And, as time went by, I became more and more sure that such a background did not excuse or mitigate violent criminality.’

The book interweaves Harding’s often very moving life story with his memories of working as a forensic psychiatrist and expert.

A case as disturbing as Liam’s is that of Jonathan, who murdered his wife after she nagged him (‘yap, yap, f***ing yap’) to do the tiling in their bathroom. He then wrapped her body in plastic and fled to Portugal. The police found the woman’s eight-year-old daughter clinging to her partially-wrapped body. 

The girl had to be dragged away; years later, Harding learns that she has taken her own life.

As in Liam’s case, the jury found Jonathan guilty only of manslaughter with diminished responsibility – on this occasion, because they bought the argument put forward by the defence, that he had a personality disorder. 

But when Harding interviewed Jonathan, he found no evidence of mental illness. Jonathan displayed a striking lack of regret, seeming to find his wife’s ‘yapping’ more troubling than the fact that he’d killed her.

Knife edge: Knives are commonly used as murder weapons

He draws a similar conclusion about a defendant, Jimmy, accused of killing his male partner, cutting his body into pieces and storing him in a freezer.

 Harding feels that Jimmy knew exactly what he was doing, and remains a danger to society, while a colleague, Ari Good, is more sympathetic. 

Jimmy has a long history of depression and had a terrible childhood; his father attempted to drown him when he was six, and his mother drank herself to death. Ari defends Jimmy on grounds of manslaughter, but the jury rejects that and convicts Jimmy of murder.

Despite coming into close contact with some of the most hardened and dangerous criminals in the country, Harding doesn’t believe in evil. ‘The human condition is more complicated than that, and life rarely, if ever, fits into a dichotomy of good versus evil, mad versus bad’, he writes. 

Still, some people don’t change, and their release into society will always put the public at risk.

On this point Harding is unwavering: ‘If I played a role in the exoneration or early release of someone dangerous who then went on to hurt someone else, I knew I would have to accept some responsibility. Not in law. But in my heart.’

In some cases, though, rehabilitation is possible. One of the more encouraging stories is that of Josh, an 11-year-old who set fire to his school’s chemistry lab, leaving a pupil with severe burns. Asked to assess Josh after the fire, Harding tries to set aside his awareness that Josh’s actions have led to another child’s disfigurement.

Gradually, he gets to the truth. Two years before Josh destroyed the lab, there was a fire at a youth club he used to attend. Josh took refuge in a cupboard, and was rescued by firefighters moments before he would have died. 

His obsession with fire is rooted in that traumatic incident. Harding refers Josh to the mental health services, who help him work through his dangerous fixation.

Guilty?: Many murderers receive reduced sentences and less severe punishments when they are deemed to be struggling with mental illness.

The book left me with a powerful respect for all the people in the health and justice systems who put their lives on the line to keep patients, and the rest of us, safe.

Particularly searing is the story of Alice, a nurse Harding worked with at a high-security hospital, where offenders with severe and dangerous mental health problems are allowed to mix freely with staff and one another.

Alice was ‘an exceptional nurse’, Harding writes: firm, kind, a passionate believer that all patients are capable of rehabilitation. One day, when she was watching Bargain Hunt with some patients, he saw one of them take out a knife and plunge it into Alice’s eye.

Blood flowed from her socket ‘like a spring’; an ambulance was called but her eye couldn’t be saved.

Alice never returned to work in the hospital. Harding writes that he still thinks of her, years later. 

And he wonders if her faith, that rehabilitation is possible for everyone, endured after her horrific attack.