"She's crazy and she takes crazy-pills, and everyone knows that means that nothing she says is true" is not something that you're supposed to be able to say about people, whether they're witnesses in a case or not. That's my paraphrase of what Mr. Clare said about Jackie, and I think it's an accurate paraphrase of his discriminatory statements.
Logic should, but unfortunately seldom does, suggest that people who are suffering from long-term, emotional upheaval are not good at lying. To be convincing, a liar needs to be able to construct something that sounds logical to other people, which I can tell you from my many admissions to mental hospitals is something that most people who are in emotional distress have a difficult time doing.
Nobody should be able to throw discriminatory trigger phrases into a courtroom or anywhere else with the assurance that everyone who hears them will immediately assume a generally accepted, and wrong, cultural attitude of disgust, distrust and blame toward the person who is being characterized by those phrases. It happens all the time about mental health, and it should never happen.
These are pictures of sequential, but not all contiguous, parts of the Rolling Stone article. The noncontiguous sections are separated by lines.
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Parameters need to be set for discussions in the courtroom and the media about Jackie's mental health. If she has a psychiatric diagnosis that someone wants to say is relevant, the question of whether or not it's relevant should be subject to formal assertion and rebuttal, which Jackie is no position to argue since she's not being called as a witness and there don't seem to be any medical witnesses for either side.
Also, if she has a psychiatric diagnosis, then that puts her in a legally protected, although seldom respected, category and so discriminatory statements that are meant to bias everyone who hears them should be forbidden in the courtroom and in the media.
"He's black" has stopped being socially and legally accepted as an automatic verdict of guilt for defendants in rape cases in the United States. "She's crazy" should have stopped being an automatic verdict of innocence for accused rapists, and it never has.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, October 19, 2016 @ 9:19 p.m.
