Stressed to Kill: The Defense of Brainwashing : Sniper Suspect's Claim

By Don Oldenburg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 21, 2003; Page C01

As sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo stands trial this week, his insanity
defense relies on a controversial claim rarely heard in courtrooms: The
defendant was brainwashed to kill. But whether Malvo is a "Manchurian
Candidate" sniper or a coldblooded killer who acted on his own volition is a
question that ventures into complicated territory -- that of the human mind
and an often bitter three-decade debate over the validity of brainwashing.

In the courtroom of public opinion, the word "brainwashing" has a dramatic
history. There, it recalls the blank stares and swastika-carved foreheads of
Manson family murderers, the gruesome scene of 912 bodies after the mass
suicide at Jonestown 25 years ago last Tuesday and the mass suicide by
Heaven's Gate members, convinced that by killing themselves they would
rejoin their alien kin on a spaceship heading home. The word is still used
to explain incomprehensible behavior today. When Islamic extremists flew
airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, some speculated
brainwashing. The mother of "shoe bomber" Richard Reid and the father of
American Taliban soldier John Walker Lindh said their sons were brainwashed.
When kidnapped Elizabeth Smart was reported to have strangely complied with
her abductors, her father said she had been brainwashed.

But social scientists and legal scholars are split over whether brainwashing
is junk science or a real phenomenon.






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The Consortium of Scientific Investigation and Research
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Investigative Psychology
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