PTSD Not a Saviour in Polk Murder Trial

anthony · #1 26-06-2006, 11:14 PM

Quote:

A jury found California housewife Susan Polk guilty of second-degree murder Friday in the stabbing death of her wealthy psychologist husband.

An interesting piece on how PTSD is not a saviour in your actions against another. Though, this woman defended herself... why, who knows, but she did, which wasn't the smartest of moves IMHO. With a good lawyer, I think she could have really displayed the full roots of PTSD in a more pronounced way, instead of having her (the sufferer of PTSD) attempt to enlighten a court about PTSD as a nut.

Quote:

Susan Polk spent nine days on the stand, claiming Felix drugged and raped her as a teen, poisoned the family dogs, brainwashed their sons, and plotted the 1978 assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone.

She called a psychic detective to the stand in an attempt to lend credibility to her claim to be a medium. She said her husband was a secret Israeli intelligence agent who hypnotized her into trances to glean her predictions and feed them to the Mossad.

Her husband threatened to kill her, their children and their pets, Susan Polk said, if she ever left him or divulged what she knew about him.

She told jurors she refused to undergo a psychological evaluation and denied suffering from delusions.

An expert on domestic violence testified that Polk appeared to be suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder due to her husband's abuse, but that she was not delusional.

Felix Polk's autopsy noted 27 stab and incise wounds and blunt force trauma to the head.

Dueling experts

Battling medical experts testified that Felix died from heart failure due to blocked arteries, and alternately that his weakened heart was simply a contributing factor in his death.

Susan Polk's relatively minor injuries -- red discoloration around her eyes, bite marks on the hand and a red welt on her shoulder -- did not help her case.

She was granted the right to represent herself at trial after firing five attorneys. Her first trial, in October, ended in a mistrial during its first week when defense attorney Daniel Horowitz came home to find his own wife had been murdered.

Polk faced serious challenges as an in-custody defendant acting as her own attorney. But she made forceful objections in court, pored over case law and never backed down from an argument.

The thin, gray-haired defendant with the meek voice and acid tongue was often her own worst enemy at trial.

If she were truly an attorney, the judge admonished Polk several times, she would have suffered severe sanctions for her constant disregard for the court's rulings and her daily allegations of misconduct and bias lobbed at the judge, the prosecutor, the deputies, the clerk, even the court reporter.
Polk told jurors the judge had instructed the court reporter to falsify the record. She called the prosecutor an "immoral creep," a "lying, deceitful" man," and a "P.E. major."

Source: CNN