Part One: Dr. Death: The Texas Death Row Psychiatrist Who Killed So Many People

Robert sits down with Steven Monacelli to tell the grisly tale of a Texas psychiatrist who invented an industry based on convincing juries to kill people. (2 Part series) sources: TRAVELS WITH Dr. DEATH | Vanity Fair | May 1990 https://archive.is/U4n1t#selection-2109.0-2109.203 Death’s Conviction https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/deaths-conviction James Grigson Testimony Linked to Miscarriages of Justice https://www.medlinfirm.com/blog/miscarriages-of-justice-linked-to-dr-death-james-grigson-continue/ Effect of "Dr. Death" and his testimony lingers https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Effect-of-Dr-Death-and-his-testimony-lingers-1960299.php Flawed Trials Lead to Death Chamber | Death Penalty Information Center https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/flawed-trials-lead-to-death-chamber Texas halts execution of accomplice tainted by 'Dr Death' testimony - BBC News https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37141426 James Grigson Obituary (2004) - Dallas, TX - Dallas Morning News https://obits.dallasnews.com/us/obituaries/dallasmorningnews/name/james-grigson-obituary?id=27809118&_gl=1*1dvjfp0*_gcl_au*MTAyMjAyOTk0NS4xNzUwOTkxNTU0 The Law; Expert Witness Is Unfazed by 'Dr. Death' Label - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/10/us/the-law-expert-witness-is-unfazed-by-dr-death-label.html Law: They Call Him Dr. Death | TIME https://time.com/archive/6700497/law-they-call-him-dr-death/ Texas 'Dr. Death' retires after 167 capital case trials - Washington Times https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2003/dec/20/20031220-113219-5189r/ 82-6080. PDF https://www.psychiatry.org/File%20Library/Psychiatrists/Directories/Library-and-Archive/amicus-briefs/amicus-1982-barefoot.pdf Implicit bias | ASU News https://news.asu.edu/20160225-solutions-implicit-bias On Texas' Death Row, Ramiro Gonzales Gets Help From Doctor Who Condemned Him | The Marshall Project https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/07/11/this-doctor-helped-send-ramiro-gonzales-to-death-row-now-he-s-changed-his-mind Dr. Death, This Side of the Twilight Zone: Estelle v. Smith (1981) — MAX WACHTEL, PHD https://www.maxwachtel.com/blog-1/dr-death-estelle-v-smith Texas Study Challenges 'Violent Behavior' Predictions - Los Angeles Times https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-mar-31-na-death31-story.html The origins of forensic psychiatry in the United States and the great nineteenth-century crisis over the adjudication of wills - PubMed https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9323654/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Time to party. It's not time to party. It's time to be sad. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that exists to make your week worse so that you're you're more irritable and frustrated around your friends and family and at work and just a just a less happy person, you know, all together. That's our job here at Behind the Bastards.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Stop talking about us.

• 0:27Robert Evans?

  For some reason, this this is profitable. Uh, my guest today, Steven Monacelli. Steven, how you doing?

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm pretty awful.

• 0:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Pretty awful.

• 0:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. That's that's the general vibe. Everybody seems to be awful.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Did Robert get your last name right?

• 0:45Speaker 02

  What did he say? I blacked out.

• 0:47Robert Evans?

  I said Monacelli.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  I mean, it's Monacelli or Monachelli. It just depends on, you know, which side of Ellis Island you're on.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Fair enough. Fair enough.

• 0:55Robert Evans?

  That's right. The right side. I could do like I could do like a Montecelli.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  You can do that.

• 1:01Robert Evans?

  Finger gesture. Yeah.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Cause you're Italian.

• 1:03Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. No, no, no. Steven and I can both say the two slurs that that Italians get.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Anyone can. Anyone can do it. It's always acceptable.

• 1:12Robert Evans?

  It's always fine.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  I feel very outnumbered today because I don't have a beard and you're both Italian and the blonde hair and...

• 1:19Robert Evans?

  I'm not I, you know, there's, there's, there's, there's some wonderful things about having Italian heritage, but I think when your country invents fascism, everyone gets to make fun of your your accent forever. Like, that's just a fair rule. That's just a fair rule.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Hasn't even really been that long. We need a little more time.

• 1:34Robert Evans?

  Less than a century or just about a little over a century since it started, I guess.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:40Robert Evans?

  Steven, how do you feel about Texas, the state that we both came from and that you still reside in?

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Oh, complicated feelings. Very complicated feelings, Robert. Do we have time for that? I'm not sure.

• 1:54Robert Evans?

  Well, that's what we're going to be talking about all week. Specifically, we're going to be talking about one of the things Texas is most famous for. I'm not talking about Shiner Bach beer. I'm not talking about some other less pleasant things than Shiner Bach beer. Well, I am. I'm talking about one of those things. I'm talking about our death row.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought you were going to talk about them trading, uh, Luka Doncic to my Lakers.

• 2:16Robert Evans?

  No, I feel like it's been a long time since anyone in Texas made good sports-related choices.

• 2:28Speaker 03

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• 2:32Robert Evans?

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• 3:13Robert Evans?

  skin but tough enough for messes of historical proportions. Unlike baby wipes, dude wipes are flushable and designed to begin breaking down when flushed. No battles there. They come in a range of at-home and travel-friendly formats, from individually wrapped singles to 48-count big daddies. Don't let skids be your lasting legacy. Grab a dude wipe and destroy the evidence. Dude wipes, best clean, pants down, available at major retailers nationwide.

• 3:39Robert Evans?

  Stephen, what do you know about Texas death row?

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Well, I know it's pretty bad. It's one of the worst in the nation. It's sizable. And there was a period of time, I believe, when we got rid of the death penalty and then we decided to bring it back, if I'm not mistaken.

• 3:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there was a period of time in which, like, the whole country was kind of like, we need to take a look at how we handle, like, because the death penalty was stopped nationwide for a while and then reinstated in 1976 after some Supreme Court rulings. We'll talk a little bit about that. But since the death penalty was reinstated in 76, Texas has executed more people than any other state. We're at, I think, 595 right now. I've seen a couple of different numbers, but they're all around 600, like, since 1976, like, somewhere in that vicinity. Last year, I think we, Texas executed five people. So, we execute a lot of folks. And as we'll talk about, we've executed a lot of folks that we know

• 4:44Robert Evans?

  are definitely innocent over the last 50 years or so, right? It happens a lot.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  And even recently, yeah, in the past year or two, there's high-profile cases.

• 4:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And if you look at like a lot of Innocence Project cases where it's like, oh, we now have evidence this guy was pretty much definitely innocent, but they got executed. Texas is often the state that they were executed in. And today, we're not talking about the whole system. That's a different episode, probably. We're talking about one guy who had an outsized role in making the system the way it was, and who has probably done more damage to psychiatry as a discipline than maybe any other single figure outside of like, you know, the Nazi period, right? Like, we're talking about a guy who was known as Dr. Death, but in Texas. And, you know, there's another Dr. Death that was famous, Jack Kevorkian, who was the like advocate for a patient's right to die. I think if you, you and I grew up around the same time, you probably

• 5:39Robert Evans?

  remember hearing stories about Jack Kevorkian, who also got called that. He was a very different guy. There's some like weird and questionable stuff about Kevorkian, some like eugenics edge stuff that he wrote about privately. But he's not really someone we'd focus on in this show. I think fundamentally, what he was doing is like, more or less fine, you know, with some with some potential room for quibbles there. The Dr. Death we're talking about is Texas's Dr. Death. And he did not assist people who wanted to die with doing so painlessly and with dignity. Instead, he took it upon himself to use a psychiatric degree to feed dozens and dozens of human beings to Texas's death row. He was the doctor who would sit down and tell a jury,

• 6:21Robert Evans?

  this man has to be executed, or he will kill again. That was his business. And his name was Dr. James Grigson. Have you ever heard of this guy?

• 6:31Speaker 02

  So, to be honest, no. When you first reached out and mentioned Dr. Death, there was another doctor in North Texas who had also been given that moniker.

• 6:40Robert Evans?

  We've got a couple of them, huh?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And so that was the person who I immediately thought you were referring to.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Way to go, Texas.

• 6:47Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, but he was like some surgeon and plano and some botched stuff happened and a bunch of people died. So, not that. Not that.

• 6:57Robert Evans?

  We, I'm sure we'll cover him. Bad, bad like elective surgery stories is, is one of our bread and butter. It's just like bad, you know, doctors who get people killed that way. But Grigson.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  No, didn't hear, didn't hear about him. No.

• 7:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's a. You know, it's awful, obviously, if someone's just like incompetent or not taking care and kills people accidentally. But this is a guy who like his business was convincing juries to kill people, right? And it made him like a fairly wealthy man. And so, yeah, that's the guy we're talking about today, Dr. James Grigson, who was born James Paul Grigson Jr. on January 30th of 1932 in Texarkana, Texas. And if our listeners haven't been to Texarkana, how do you, how would you describe Texarkana? It's like a little bit of Texas, a little bit of Louisiana, a little bit of Oklahoma, you know?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, the lake culture is a big thing. Lake Texoma is a huge lake. And so, yeah, think, think about kind of the grimy, like, you know, swampy bayou culture, but it's inland around a lake.

• 8:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, yeah, inland swamp culture. It's like, it's a good way to put it. When I was a kid, because I grew up in like, southern Oklahoma for a while, I had to go there to get allergy shots. So Texarkana is permanently on my shit list as like a city of pain.

• 8:19Robert Evans?

  But not for any good reason, just because they had a doctor in the town I grew up in had fuck all. So I guess I shouldn't be angry at them anymore. But yeah, I didn't like getting allergy shots. Anyway, that's where, that's where James Paul Grigson Jr. is born. His mother is Ethel Mae McLeod, and his father is James Paul Grigson, senior, obviously. We have very little about his upbringing. The few details we do get paint a picture of a kid who came from like, a comfortable background, probably upper middle class. It's a little hard for me to tell, but he admitted in a 1990 interview that as a kid, his family's money came from the tombstone business, right? They had a, they had a license

• 8:59Robert Evans?

  to sell. There's apparently a trademark type of marble that everyone used to use for headstones that's called Rock of Ages, right? And for whatever reason, you had to have like, a license to like, you had to be like, a, like a distributor to sell this shit, right? This one type of fucking marble that only this one company could license. And his family were the only ones who could sell it in like, four states, including Arkansas and Texas. So my guess is, they did pretty well, right? That's one of those businesses, like, people are always gonna be dying. So yeah, I mean, the tombstone business, not a bad one to be in. And it's interesting to me that, kind of from the very earliest moments of his life, this guy's financial comfort is always tied to death as a business, right? For his whole life.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  So crazy.

• 9:45Robert Evans?

  It's a bit poetic. Yeah, it really is. Now, one of the few details that we get of his childhood came from an article called "Travels with Dr. Death" by journalist Ron Rosenbaum for Vanity Fair. And Rosenbaum quotes him as claiming in this interview, quote, "He and his brother would come home from work and lock themselves into epic fratricidal chess matches, hour after hour, night after night. The doctor's brother went on to become a professional pool shark and gambler." So, he's both this very competitive person, his big influence growing up is kind of a con man, right? But he doesn't go for, like, the petty con man business. He chooses academia, right? That's he and his brother split. His brother goes off to be a pool shark. But James has got to have that, like, DNA, that, like, desire to, I've

• 10:30Robert Evans?

  always got to win, and also, I have kind of loose morals about how I make my money, right? That seems to be something he and his brother are both kind of simpatico on. He goes to Texas A&M with a small, tight group of friends who all opt for careers in the Navy, but Jim gravitates towards science, and he winds up entering a pre-med program. He goes to Southwestern Medical School, and while he's starting college, while he's starting medical school, he gets married to Mary Lee Stone, and they start having kids. Eventually, four of them. He supports his growing family by working two full-time jobs and three part-time jobs at the same time, per his obituary. So that's what his family would later claim. I don't know if he's working, what is that, 140 hours a week? Something like that? And

• 11:15Robert Evans?

  going to school? But that's what he later claims. This guy is not a reliable narrator, so, I don't know. Maybe he's not putting in quite that much effort, but, or maybe he found some really good bullshit jobs. Either way. He gets into medicine and he really likes doing his clinical rotations. That obituary notes, "Jim loved the excitement of the emergency room, but the hours of a psychiatrist allowed more family time. He loved the challenge of figuring out puzzles, the human brain being the most complicated. When finished with formal school, Jim thought he could learn more by teaching. He taught psychiatry at Southwestern for four years. During this period, he developed his specialty of forensic psychiatry, which became the passion of his career." And that's the kind of clean version of his backstory

• 11:59Robert Evans?

  that clearly he told his family and that, yeah, they wanted to believe is that he, he starts teaching and he just kind of develops an interest in forensic psychiatry, right as it's developing as a discipline, and just falls in love with the field, right? That's, that's what he said. So pretty anodyne backstory so far. Nothing too sketchy here, except for the fact that forensic psychiatry kind of has a sketchy history as a discipline, right? It's, it's, it's not like, it's not always been the quest for knowledge of the human brain. A lot of times it's been the quest for like, well, I believe certain things about people that I don't like. And it's really nice to be able to claim scientifically that this is true, right? You know, you've, you've got, there's not as thick a line

• 12:43Robert Evans?

  separating psychiatry from phrenology in the early part of the 20th century as we'd like.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, you know, and not to mix up our fields too much, but it dovetails with the lovely practice of lobotomies, which some of us wish we could bring back at this point in time for our own self benefit.

• 13:00Robert Evans?

  Just for mercy's sake. Yeah. Maybe they had a point. Right. Yeah. Nice pick in the old frontal lobe. Sounds nice right about now.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  They might've been on to something like Freud, but that's another conversation.

• 13:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  But an apt field for someone who may have had a slightly con man-esque tendencies to fall into in the time of this story.

• 13:22Robert Evans?

  It's a perfect field for that. And, you know, it's perfect in part because it's really new. Like forensic psychiatry as an idea was less than a century old when he kind of starts studying it, right? It had kind of begun. I mean, it kind of, it depends on how you date it, but somewhere around a little over a century to less than a century old when he starts going to school. Right. And that doesn't mean that it had been kind of really settled in any sort of way as a discipline for most of that period of time. We kind of start seeing the early gasps of what becomes forensic psychiatry near the middle, you know, in the 30s and 40, the 1830s, 1840s to kind of the mid to late 1800s.

• 14:02Robert Evans?

  And initially, when the field first got involved, when kind of psychiatry first starts getting involved in criminal justice and the solving of crime and, you know, the judging of people who've been accused of crimes. The, the work of psychiatrists who are getting into that field is kind of initially less focused on what it will be, which is, are these people, you know, competent to stand trial? Was this person aware of what they were doing? Are they likely to offend again? It was less, it was less focused on stuff like that than on stuff like the adjudication of wills. Right. Like initially forensic psychiatrists were often brought in because someone would die and give their money to someone the family didn't want it to go to. And so you'd bring in this kind of proto forensic psychiatrist to determine whether or not

• 14:47Robert Evans?

  the person who had died was compos mentis when they signed their will. And I found a really interesting article on this because it dovetails with what Grigson's career is going to become. In the American Academy of Psychiatry Law Journal, and that article notes, "The evidence suggests that postmortem diagnoses of insanity were employed through the middle decades of the 19th century to maintain stable and predictable patterns of property conveyance in the New Republic. But such diagnoses then became something of a fad, a way to raid states. Courts and legislatures reacted against that trend during the last decades of the 19th century, when fundamental social stability was no longer an issue in order to protect individual testators and limit the, limit the power of forensic psychiatry." So it starts off as a way for people to go like, hey,

• 15:31Robert Evans?

  I think I should get some of that guy's money. And if I can hire a better professional than the other guy, right? Then I can get this, I can have this adjudicated. And so psychiatrists start throwing themselves, I'm an expert on whether or not someone, I can tell it by their handwriting or whatever. And it becomes this huge grift and it's just. Destroying people's like estates and ability to inherit. And so the courts have to come and be like, all of these fucking psychiatrists who are getting in the middle of the of the the probate process, the estate process are like con men and like, we need to get you the fuck out of here. This has to stop. And that basic pattern is going to be repeat itself in the in death penalty cases in Texas. From like the seventies through the nineties, right? But it's the same pattern.

• 16:13Robert Evans?

  So I think it's really interesting that it happens first a century earlier in like the estate and will process.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 16:21Robert Evans?

  It's so cool.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Of course, it starts with the money, but then as we develop this larger carceral state and institutionalization process. It bleeds into that. And then we, I guess, get to what we're talking about today. This this guy who seems like a real piece of work, based on my brief reading.

• 16:40Robert Evans?

  Yes, and it's it's interesting because it's kind of killed fairly quickly in a couple of decades. When the thing at risk is rich people's inheritance, right? When it's about that, governments start acting pretty quickly to put the kibosh on it once things get out of hand. So when the grift switches to like, let's just convince juries to kill poor people. When I will talk about how they're doing that later, don't worry. But when it switches to that, there's not as much interest in fixing it, right? Because no one's got any money.

• 17:10Robert Evans?

  It's cool stuff. You love to see it.

• 17:14Robert Evans?

  So basically, the first forensic psychiatrists, or a lot of the first forensic psychiatrists in this country. I mean, you wouldn't have called them that, but these are, you know, they're in that line of descent. Were hired guns, right? They were brought in, you know, in order to come to a specific conclusion based on who was paying them. And that, you know, a lot of what was happening here was was not really in any way different from bribery. Now, another thing is going on in this this early developing field throughout the middle of the 1800s. Not just in the US, but over in Europe. And this is that the court systems and the legal systems of Western nations are increasingly interested in how you define insanity in a legal sense, right? Now, this has been done going back, you can go back to classic, you can find cases in like ancient.

• 17:58Robert Evans?

  In Greece and stuff that, you know, are relevant to this. So there's a, this is not just, you know, a century or so of history in terms of people being interested in this and the legal profession, but it really starts to get professionalized, you know, in the middle of the 1800s. And it's kind of in this early modern period that people start accepting and building into the legal system, the idea that someone can be too out of their mind to be as truly responsible for their actions, right? That there is a degree of, if a person is, you know, dealing a degree with a certain degree of incapacitation, they're not fully responsible for even the most heinous crimes, right? That's one of the things going on here. There's some less positive things going on too, including, again, eugenics is happening in this period. So there's also, there's also interest in,

• 18:42Robert Evans?

  how do we determine who's sick so we can stop them from breeding and passing on their sickness? You know, that's the, the dark side of this. But, you know, one of the good things is that early defense attorneys are a lot of the people who are most interested in pushing, we need to be defining when someone is not compos mentis, right? Even if they absolutely did the crime because that should matter. And there's a bit of a debate. I've had, you know, some articles from historians who kind of study the history of insanity as a legal concept. There's a little bit of a debate as to whether or not we should see this medical concept as something that was first pushed by legal experts, primarily defense attorneys, in order, and was, in other words, and thus

• 19:23Robert Evans?

  is an example of the expansion of the power of law, right? That like, the law was really responsible for pushing this concept into the science, right? And for incentivizing, you know, psychiatrists, early psychiatrists to be, have an interest in declaring people to be insane, right? That that was something that came about in part because the law was pushing it. And one of the people who argued this was Michelle Foucault, per an article in the Journal of Medical History, "Though psychiatric expertise for a brief moment may have been introduced as an alternative mode of power, it soon found its place alongside the law in the medicolegal apparatus of the 19th century, thereby expanding power rather than usurping it. In this manner, the alleged humanization of punishment in the 19th century

• 20:05Robert Evans?

  was countered by the expansion of disciplinary power." In other words, while some of this is good, the fact that we're saying, well, some people really can't be held responsible for their actions, what you're also seeing here is the law asserting A degree of control over like, who gets a full set of rights because of their mental state, right? And that that's kind of the dark side of this.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Right. It wasn't just a matter of whether Johnny did a crime and was out of his gourd and shouldn't be held accountable for it. It was a matter of should Jane be put into an institution where their freedom of movement is restricted and they're applied with medications or forced to take some sort of procedures they would not otherwise have agreed to do.

• 20:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. If the law is saying, hey, we need you to define insanity because we're going to use it to declare that certain groups of people are treated differently and restricted in different ways by the law. That's really an expansion in the power of law in a meaningful way. So yeah, in other words, there's kind of a couple of different major developments that set the stage for our doctor death, right? In the late 1800s and the early 1900s, which is that forensic psychiatrists are often being used as hired guns to secure desired results in court and that that's very much at the root of the profession and that the concept of insanity and definitions of mental health become incorporated into the legal process in a way that is going to make medical diagnoses a relevant aspect of how the

• 21:32Robert Evans?

  state can prosecute people and what it can do to them. Rosenbaum, who's the writer who spent the most time with Dr. Grigson, describes him as a country boy with a killer instinct, who after getting his MD, attended a psychiatric residency at Parkland Hospital. Again, he teaches for a while, but Rosenbaum asserts this doesn't provide him with enough of a challenge or enough of an opportunity to compete, right? Like, and that's kind of this journalist who knows the guy best is like, I think it's naturally, there's not an adversarial process in traditional psychiatry. Your psych isn't supposed to be fighting you? And like, this guy wants psychiatry. He wants to win at psychiatry. So the court process provides him, if he can get involved in court cases, then he's part

• 22:14Robert Evans?

  of an adversarial process, which means he can win and someone else can lose and he could prove that he's better, right? Than someone else.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  Put points on the board.

• 22:23Robert Evans?

  Kid put points on the board, right? The kind of traditional way, good science academia is supposed to go did not suit the quote pool shark at him and so he decides I'm gonna find a way that I can win at psychiatry and that's why he gets into forensic psychiatry. Now Rosenbaum claims it's the duel of wits with dangerous criminals which enthralled Grigson and this is likely that Grigson would say certain things himself. He had some quotes where he'd basically be like Batman, like I'm at a war with crime, right criminals like I am I have I'm arraying myself against the most dangerous and deadly criminal masterminds in the world and he he really wants to portray himself as this genius chess master. He'll talk a lot about his childhood chess games and then you know these this adversarial

• 23:08Robert Evans?

  process with all these these murderers and whatnot and he wants you to look at them as like he's constantly every week he's fighting Hannibal Lecter, right? Like that's who he's going up against and that's just not true. That's not at all true. And we're gonna talk about how off this belief he has about himself that he really pushed in every interview he ever did is, but first, we're gonna talk about some ads. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Good response to ads.

• 23:40Robert Evans?

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• 24:40Robert Evans?

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• 25:33Speaker 05

  system on G2. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, then get 20% off your first six months at quo.com/behind. That's Q-U-O dot com slash behind.

• 25:51Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Well, I don't know about you, but I'm planning on purchasing that product and/or service. You know, I'm gonna use money as a means of exchange in order to buy goods and services. That sounds fun to me.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  We love the money form.

• 26:06Robert Evans?

  We love the money.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  On this podcast.

• 26:08Robert Evans?

  What kind of money do you use, Stephen? Are you one of those, do you like to drag around those big, like, 500-pound wheels and whirl them across the ground and use those as a means of exchange?

• 26:17Speaker 02

  I like cuneiform tablets.

• 26:19Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, or anything that you can really feel the heft of it when it's in your pocket.

• 26:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, because I like that, too, so much better than like, I never call a company anymore. I'm not gonna get stuck on the phone with a chatbot. If I have a complaint, I'm going to like hammer into like a mud tablet. I'm gonna hammer into mud and dry it, and then I'm gonna mail that cuneiform tablet to whatever company and complain about the poor-grade copper that they're selling me, you know?

• 26:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, the only issue is I find that they don't take it on the online gambling sites that may or may not have been advertised before this.

• 26:56Robert Evans?

  No.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  So that's the one downside, but I'm keeping myself straight these days. So I'm doing what I can.

• 27:03Robert Evans?

  That's good. Cuneiform is good for that. Speaking of keeping yourself straight, Dr. Grigson is fascinated by people who can't keep on the straight and narrow, right? These are habitual criminals. These are folks who have serious impulse control issues, which is obviously the majority of folks who wind up committing capital crimes, right? Now, there is our number of kind of different psychiatric diagnoses that we use today for, you know, this, these kind of people. The word Grigson uses and the word that you find over and over again in all of the reporting on his work is sociopath, right? He is fascinated with sociopaths. He likes to diagnose people as sociopaths, right?

• 27:48Robert Evans?

  And it's very important that you understand, because this is my pet peeve, sociopath and sociopathy are not medical diagnoses. They absolutely are not. No one is diagnosed as a sociopath. It's not a medical diagnosis. It is a term people like to use because they think it is, but it's not. Now, it used to be the term that was proper, that people tended to use kind of interchangeably with sociopath is psychopath, right? And psychopathy is what a lot of, a lot of these people, a lot of like people who commit murder, particularly people who, again, are kind of these career criminals, career violent criminals, who have a lot of issues with impulse control, who don't really seem to

• 28:32Robert Evans?

  have much in the way of empathy. Psychopathy is the term that was used for a long time to describe them. We don't use that anymore, right? The current diagnosis that those people tend to be given today is antisocial personality disorder, or APD, right? Which has replaced what we call psychopathy, right? But it's important you know that at the time Dr. Grigson was working, psychopath would have been the medical term for the people that he was declaring to be sociopaths. And when you're talking to like a regular person, like when your friend's like, oh yeah, man, my boss did this or this, and I think he's a sociopath. It's fine. I don't care. I'm not gonna, I don't correct somebody just in your daily life. If you're a psychiatrist, you should get the term right, right? You shouldn't just make, you shouldn't just be

• 29:15Robert Evans?

  using a term that's not a medical diagnosis for a guy that you're declaring has an illness that makes him more dangerous, like for the purpose of a death penalty hearing, right? Which is what's going on here. This just really bugs me. Now, psychopaths, which is again, the term when he's doing these diagnoses, or people with APD, which is what we use today, are people who don't feel guilty for impulsive or violent actions. They lie to others easily and without qualm. They rarely have close relationships and they often fall into criminal behavior. Hannibal Lecter is probably still the number one cultural touchstone as to, you know, what we used to call psychopaths. But the vast majority of people with APD are not

• 29:56Robert Evans?

  geniuses and they're not good planners, right? That's kind of a key aspect. This isn't everyone, but most people with APD have horrible impulse control. They're not good at planning. They're not good at like plotting out genius getaways, right? That's why a lot of these people get caught is they don't tend to be, a lot of it talks about how they're below average IQ. I have my issues with IQ, but these are not people who make good decisions that allow them to be like Dexter, right? They're not one step ahead of the authorities. They're deciding in a moment to commit a violent crime and then running like fuck and leaving a shitload of evidence. That's the norm, right? These people are not masterminds. The ones who are, you know, you know, might have been diagnosed a psychopath or have APD, who don't have these problems,

• 30:40Robert Evans?

  who do have good impulse control, who are better at planning, we know tend to gravitate towards one of a couple of different careers. They're overrepresented in business, like MBAs, executives. They are overrepresented in law enforcement and they are overrepresented in the clergy. These are, they go for jobs, the folks who are, do have that Hannibal Lecter mastermind capability, they go for jobs where they're protected, right? By what their, their job is, where people don't look at them or assume because of their social status. That they'll be doing the fucked up shit that they're doing, right?

• 31:11Speaker 02

  It also it also provides them a certain amount of power to wield over others to fulfill whatever those twisted desires are and then cover it up should they need to.

• 31:21Robert Evans?

  Right. And there's, there's also like, you know, like, all of this stuff is a spectrum, right? People have aspects of this, like, you know, the, there's a degree to which certain things that we tend to attribute to this group of people, like not being overly empathetic, can be a benefit. If you're a surgeon, maybe it's not that bad that you don't really get bothered by cutting into somebody because your job is to cut into people, right? Which in surgeons are overrepresented, you know, with aspects of, of kind of the things. And, and this criteria has been shifting. We've really started to accept in the last couple of decades that like, our old diagnoses of psychopathy were pretty flawed and they're still pretty flawed, but like, you know, we, we're moving towards a more rational

• 32:03Robert Evans?

  understanding of this whole phenomenon. But it's important you know that even by the standards of the time, Dr. Grigson, when he talks about these, these murderers who he calls sociopaths, he's just wrong. Like, he's just wrong by the medical standards of the time and certainly by the standards of the day. So in the 1960s, you know, fascinated by sociopaths, Dr. Grigson starts selling himself as a forensic psychiatrist to prosecutors and defense attorneys. Initially, his business is limited to what were called competency exams. You know, this is deciding if a defendant is sane for the purposes of standing trial. And, you know, there's nothing wrong necessarily with that idea. I mean, there's some issues with how it was applied, but this is not

• 32:44Robert Evans?

  immediately a problematic field. He would claim that he got into doing this because when he first started, he had a lot of errant beliefs about psychiatry as a result of his liberal education. Quote, "At first I got the shit conned out of me. In medical school, I was as liberal as any psychiatrist you'll ever meet. You know, most psychiatrists will say if you commit a crime, there's something wrong with you." And I don't really think that's true.

• 33:07Robert Evans?

  Because like, most people who commit crimes, it's like, I don't know, most psychiatrists would be like, "Oh, you got like, possession of small amount of marijuana, you must have a mental illness." Or, "Right? Or you didn't pay a speeding ticket for too long, because you couldn't afford it, "and you got a warrant. You have a mental illness." And that's like, even like petty theft, I get, very rarely is going to get you diagnosed with a mental illness. Like, I don't think most psychiatrists say this.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  No, no, not at all.

• 33:34Robert Evans?

  No. And it's, you know, it's also probably not even the case with murder necessarily, right? Because most of the evidence, even at that time, suggests that the majority of murders are crimes of passion, right? Which is, people who are otherwise sane, and who are otherwise functional, who lose their shit in a moment in a disastrous way, right? Not somebody who, they're not, but most murderers are not people who want to keep murdering, right? It's like, a thing that happens in a moment of passion. And, you know, it's debatable generally as to whether or not there's anything you would diagnose them with. So I just think he's, I think he's mis, like, he's describing the rest of his field badly, because his entire career is going to be spent defining himself in opposition to every other psychiatrist.

• 34:17Robert Evans?

  Like, he hates everyone else in this discipline, because he thinks they're all wrong. So he has to make up lies about what his fellows are doing. So he claims that, like, he comes in with all these ideas about, you know, "Oh, all these people must just be sick." And then he spends several thousand hours interviewing accused murderers, and he starts to understand, "Oh no, all of the other psychiatrists are wrong. "These people aren't sick. Quote, 'They were just mean.' "I often think there ought to be a diagnosis, you know? Mean son of a bitch." So, really good scientist here. Just, that sounds rigorous, that's falsifiable. I love a psychiatrist who says shit like this.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Incredible, incredible. I mean, I'm trying to imagine someone in a modern profession just saying that they spoke to a bunch of people.

• 35:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  I mean, it reminds me of thinking, like, it has something to do with humors. Like, "Oh, they're just all mean."

• 35:08Robert Evans?

  They got mean son of a bitch disease.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Nothing more to it. You can't read into it any further.

• 35:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's literally like that scene from The Simpsons, when Homer gets an elephant at the end, where there's like, "Some animals are just dicks."

• 35:22Robert Evans?

  So over time, he goes from declaring people not competent or competent to stand trial to declaring more and more defendants perfectly sane, right? Like, he starts, as he's doing this, coming to the conclusion that, like, almost nobody deserves to, you know, get off or deserves to have, you know, their sentence mitigated as the result of this. And his justification for this shift is something that he kind of perfectly crafted from his media appearances, to appeal to the law and order set in North Texas, which is where he mostly practiced. Quote, "These days, when they'll have tears falling down from their eyes, I've learned to give this response: You can knock that shit off. You're not fooling me a bit. And you can't believe it. Tears will just dry up like that."

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:03Robert Evans?

  So he's crafting his image perfectly for the place and time that he's set in, right? This is going to go over pretty well with juries. He's very popular with Texas juries for a long time. He also wears a cowboy hat a lot of the time, which is like de rigueur for a certain kind of guy. Anyway, it's a little unclear to me whether or not, you know, he ever had a liberal period as a psychiatrist, if this is just, again, part of the image he crafts because it sells well, that like, oh, I used to be one of those liberal, soft-on-crime weenies, but then I learned the truth, right? Either way, he starts testifying about the mental status of people accused of capital crimes in 1967.

• 36:46Robert Evans?

  And the main shift here is that he's no longer testifying, is this person competent to stand trial? After 67, he's primarily testifying, should this person be subjected to the death penalty, right? And to explain why. Why is a psychiatrist involved in this? Why does that matter, right? Why would you allow a psychiatrist to testify about this? This comes down to something that is not quite unique to Texas, but is almost unique to Texas in this period. So his first years practicing come during a very messy time for the death penalty, right? There are a bunch of subcommittees and committee meetings in the early 70s, after there's this kind of moratorium on the death penalty in Texas, where they're trying to figure out, how do we, as a modern state, continue to have a death penalty?

• 37:31Robert Evans?

  What should that look like, right? Because, you know, we're past the age of some Texas Rangers just going in and hanging people, right? We can't do that anymore. You know, Walker, Texas Ranger doesn't look nearly as good if he's literally putting people in a gallows. So how do we actually like build this into our system in a, in a way that's modern? And this is, this is part of, there's this massive debate nationwide at the federal level over the death penalty and like what the laws should be about it. And Texas being Texas, we, we're going to want to find a way to both keep executing people and justify it as a matter of necessity, right? We don't want to seem backwards while we're doing it. So like most Texas laws, the process of creating a modern death penalty standard to kind of replace the old ways was rushed and messy.

• 38:15Robert Evans?

  Texas Law Review describes the Texas Legislature's process as, quote, "somewhat confused," which is generally accurate with how the legislature works today. Time is a flat circle, my friend.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Generous description.

• 38:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, generous description, kind to the state and the House and Senate, who both wind up with different and conflicting standards, right? They both propose like very different sets of rules for how the death penalty oft ought to work, and they find themselves having to reconcile this in a very short timeframe. And I, I want to quote from a passage by the Texas Law Review to give you an idea of how messy the process was. "With only Memorial Day weekend to go before adjournment, the House called a conference committee to resolve the differences between the two bills. On the very last day, the conferees presented a scheme which appeared in neither the House nor the Senate bill, along with newly-minted language about a probability that the defendant would be a continuing threat. That same day, both houses passed the committee report by huge margins without specifically

• 39:14Robert Evans?

  considering the new language on future dangerousness." So to get out, in order to get out for the long weekend, after like deliberating and coming up with their own plans, they backed something completely different that no one's read because like, look, man, are we going to give up? We, I gotta get out to the lake.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  It's hot. It's hot during the legislature. You gotta get the hell out of Austin. Yeah, come on. Get the barbecue ready to go.

• 39:36Robert Evans?

  Right, right. So the vague and poorly written nature of the initial legalese leads to several years of disputes and ultimately a state Supreme Court case in 1976. The system that results from this is indeed a modern one and that it creates a several step roadmap towards deciding when and who would be executed, right? Basically, there's a, the Texas legislature builds a flowchart of death to determine like, we've convicted this guy, should we kill him? So the first thing that has to happen is the jurors have to agree unanimously that the convicted murderer had deliberately sought out to kill their victim, right? If somebody just like is drunk and hits someone with a car, that's not a death penalty case, right? There's not a deliberate intent there, you know?

• 40:20Robert Evans?

  Or if you're just Yosemite Samming and accidentally shoot some guy, there's not intent. So the next thing they have to agree on is that there's some probability that the defendant would go on to carry out future acts of violence. And then the third thing they have to decide is that, having taken everything that happened into account, there had been no provocation that had inspired the murderous violence, right? So if someone didn't punch you and then you shot them and you know, that's not an equivalent exchange of force, but you were provoked, right? That would kind of disqualify you from the death penalty, even if you'd get punished otherwise. Now, of these three points, you know, the first, I don't agree with there being, with a state like ours doing the death penalty, but those, the first and third point are at least like, I see why they're in there, right?

• 41:05Robert Evans?

  You want to make sure this is, isn't just a crime of passion and you want to make sure that like this, there's a mitigating factor, right? That this wasn't part of a fight. That second one though, that's really problematic. That's pre-crime shit, right? I mean, they've committed a, they've been convicted of a crime, but you are asking a jury to say, in the future, will this person do violence if not killed? You're asking the jury to step outside of any evidence and make a prediction about someone's future behavior. Do we see how that's maybe a problem?

• 41:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, I mean, certainly a distinction. And the only parallel I can think of is whether someone is released on bail or not, because they might be considered some sort of flight risk, or maybe a public safety risk. But if you contain that within the boundaries of holding someone in detainment, or holding them behind bars.

• 41:57Robert Evans?

  Right. This isn't a permanent status. We're not determining this person's whole life, right? You know, even though that doesn't make it not problematic. Yeah.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Right. There's a possibility they could, you know, spend time in jail and show that they're of no threat, and then you release.

• 42:11Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I mean, it is, it's a huge difference. It's requiring people to look into the future with no real basis.

• 42:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, which is, which is like weird, right? And so this second thing, right? The second, like, point on the flow chart becomes known to the legal community in Texas as special issue number two, right? And that's really what a lot of death penalty cases are going to come down to, a special issue number two, right? Is this person going to commit more violent crimes if they are left alive, you know, for the rest of their life in prison or whatever? And this is almost unique in Western jurisprudence, right? In essence, the state of Texas has codified the duty of a jury in death penalty cases to predict the future. Only one other state in the United States required a finding of future dangerousness when considering the death penalty. It's such a niche piece of like legal theory or legal, you know, procedure

• 43:04Robert Evans?

  that very few people outside of Texas are even aware that special issue number two exists. And the broader national psychiatric community doesn't seem to really have initially seen this as an issue that might concern their discipline, right? Because they're, you know, it's just that they've got 50 states. They're not concerned with like this initially as like, why would you even think psychiatrists would get involved in the special issue number two? Right? This would prove to be an error. Because if juries were now going to be asked to determine, will a person kill again if left alive? Prosecutors are going to start looking to hire experts, special experts for court cases, who can speak to what kind of behavior is predictable for what kind of defendant.

• 43:46Robert Evans?

  So Dr. Grigson is going to be among, if not the very first of these guys, of these psychiatrists, right? And he describes how he fell into this line of work in doing so as a natural evolution of his previous work. Per an article in Time, he was going about his normal duties, evaluating people for commitment proceedings when, quote, "One court veteran suddenly thought, 'Hey, here's a sane psychiatrist.' Instead of playing golf on Wednesday, I started doing legal work," right? So that happens in like the early 70s. He started like, he's been kind of evaluating people in a similar way for a while, but now it's sort of codified into like, this is how we're determining whether or not to execute people, you know, by the mid 70s. And in short order, court cases now take up most of his professional

• 44:30Robert Evans?

  time. He's making like a hundred dollars an hour, bringing in some $60,000 a year in the 70s, which is hundreds of thousands today. This is a lot of money in the 70s. This is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars a year in modern money, right? And he's, again, he's doing like a day of work a week, right? So, nice gig if you can get it.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's got the Pat Sajak career path.

• 44:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah. When interviewed about Dr. Grigson, University of Texas Law Professor George Dick said, "He is skillful and persuasive, and he doesn't talk down to the jury." Most importantly, Dick said, "Grigson is more willing than most colleagues to make predictions about a defendant's future behavior, and really strong ones, right? He's willing to say, 'This person will definitely,' as opposed to other psychiatrists who'd get up and be like, 'Well, you know, it's not uncommon for people with this to reoffend, but I can't say.' He will say, 'Oh, I can guarantee you 100% this person will kill again if you don't execute them now,' right? You're not supposed to do that.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  He was giving his clients what they were paying for, it sounds like.

• 45:39Robert Evans?

  Yes, exactly. And there's going to be research in the future that shows that when, whether or not psychiatrists are hired by the defense or prosecution biases their findings on individuals that they're asked to like evaluate. Right that like, yeah, who is paying you matters, you know? And that's important. None of this is blind. It's not the court hiring someone to say, just tell us one way or the other, right? This is prosecution being like, I want another, I want to put a death penalty thing on my belt, you know, like, make sure this guy, we can fry this son of a bitch.

• 46:17Robert Evans?

  Now, this is again, not something that psychiatrists should be doing, or that was ever considered to be okay within the mainstream of psychiatry in this period. But Dr. Grekson takes it upon himself to make himself Texas's most recognized expert on whether or not someone will kill again if left alive. Writing for Vanity Fair, Rosenbaum describes, quote, "This is where the doctor comes in. He'll take the stand, listen to a recitation of facts about the killing and the killer, and then, usually without examining the defendant, without ever setting eyes on him until the day of the trial, tell the jury that, as a matter of medical science, he can assure them the defendant will pose a continuing danger to society, as defined by number two. That's all it takes. What makes the doctor so effective, both prosecution and defense lawyers will tell you this, is his bedside manner with the jury.

• 47:02Robert Evans?

  He is kindly, gregarious, country doctor manner. His reassuring, beautifully modulated East Texas drawl help jurors get over the hump and do the deed, says one bitter defense lawyer. He's kind of like a Marcus Welby who tells you it's okay to kill."

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Jesus. So he, he basically does the least amount of work possible and comes out with the most certain opinion possible?

• 47:24Robert Evans?

  Yes, with the most certain opinion he does, and he's not, again, you were, there's a whole thing about this, the Goldwater rule, based on, you know, that guy who was considered a crazy conservative, and so psychiatrists started like diagnosing him on TV as like, you know, paranoid and whatever. And the, the, the discipline, the APA was like, you can't do that. You've never met the man. You can't, you can't just diagnose a guy from television. And he's not even diagnosing it from TV. He's like sitting across from a dude, reading a police summary of the crime and going like, oh yeah, let me tell you what this guy's got.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Insane. So insane and getting paid so much money to do so.

• 48:02Robert Evans?

  Getting paid a lot of money. By the way, Marcus Welby, M D was a TV show about a doctor.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 48:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, James Brolin played one of the characters. So there you go. Young James Brolin.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Good stuff.

• 48:15Robert Evans?

  So this is like, this is bad ethics and this kind of starts initially when he's doing this. He's using, he'll go in and he'll taught, he will interview the defendant and he'll, but he'll interview them under false pretenses. He'll interview them under the pretenses of determining whether or not they're sane. And then sometimes he'll even be paid to do both. He'll be paid to determine whether or not they're sane. And then he will use that same analysis of them in order to say, oh yeah, this guy will definitely kill again. Right. Which is really ethically questionable. The fact that he's effectively interviewing people under false pretenses in order to diagnose them and what is, you know, like, there's a lot that's going to be like very questionable about this to a lot of people.

• 49:00Robert Evans?

  But, you know, in, you know, the mid seventies, late, you know, late sixties, mid seventies, when kind of he ramps up doing this, there's just not a lot of eyes on him. Right? In 1975, the National Institute of Mental Health publishes a monograph titled Mental Health and Law, which is based on extensive research of psychiatrists who had attempted to predict long-term criminal behavior in their patients. And it found that there was no reliable criteria for long-term predictions like the ones Dr. Grigson had started to make for à la carte payments. But again, there wasn't really an idea that anyone would do this for money, the way that he was. So he's, he's not initially drawing a lot of attention for acting as like a gig worker for the electric chair.

• 49:43Robert Evans?

  You know, he's, he keeps testifying in case after case throughout the late seventies. And for an idea of how uniquely prolific he is, by 1976, which is two years after the Texas State Supreme Court ruling, Grigson had testified against more than 25% of people on death row. Right? So he had, he had declared more than a quarter of people set to be executed by Texas to be incurable sociopaths who would kill again. Like that's, those are the kind of numbers he's putting up.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  Wow, wow. And because there's no overlapping set of ethics between the medical profession and the legal profession, nothing that he did in the court of law was necessarily illegal.

• 50:24Robert Evans?

  No.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Even if it clearly went against basic ethics.

• 50:29Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  In the medical field.

• 50:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and that's, that's kind of where things, because things are going to come to a head in the Supreme Court a couple of times over this, over the fact that everyone in his medical discipline is saying this is bad, but it's not illegal, right? So while he is initially kind of lonely, if not quite singular in doing this for a living, he, people start following him when they realize how much money there is. There's so many capital cases in Texas, there's plenty of them for a number of psychiatrists. And people realize he's spending like a day a week and getting like fucking 60 grand a year? Fuck it, you know? Hell, like a day a week for 60 grand is pretty good money today. You know, like a lot of people would kill for that kick.

• 51:15Robert Evans?

  So there had been, you know, interest, this is not a thing like, I don't want to paint it as like no one had ever considered prior to Grigson trying to predict violent criminal behavior, as that study I just quoted from noted, this had been something psychiatrists had considered, but like the data suggested that like, no, we're really bad at this. And a number of studies published in the seventies were analyzed in 1981 by Professor Jay Monahan for a paper titled "The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior." An amicus brief filed to the US Supreme Court by the American Psychiatric Association summarizes, quote, "No psychiatric procedures or techniques had succeeded in reducing the high rate of false positive predictions, that is, affirmative predictions of future violent behavior that are subsequently proven erroneous."

• 51:58Robert Evans?

  Professor Monahan observed that, even allowing for possible distortions and certain of the research data, "it would be fair to conclude that the best clinical research currently in existence indicates that psychiatrists and psychologists are accurate and no more than one out of three predictions of violent behavior over a several year period." So the APA, this comes up, like, there's a Supreme Court case in 1981 over what Grigson is doing, and it's over a couple of issues. Number one, the fact that he's carrying out a lot of these evaluations under false pretenses. He's taking data for a competency hearing, and he's using it to determine whether or not someone will kill again. And just the whole issue with can we even let psychiatrists predict this sort of thing?

• 52:38Robert Evans?

  And the APA files a brief saying, "Our best guess is that the most accurate we can be is like 30% or so," right? Which is not accurate enough for determining whether or not people should fucking die. And that's like the data that the Supreme Court's going to have.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  I mean, it's higher than I thought it would be.

• 52:59Robert Evans?

  It's actually much lower than that. Again, this is the data they have in the, in 81, right?

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 53:05Robert Evans?

  But it's low enough to show that like what he's doing is unethical. And this, this is kind of the first time Dr. Grigson blows up. And there's, there's a little bit of a media circus around this case and around Dr. Grigson. This is when he starts being identified as Dr. Death in like a big way. I found a 1981 Time article titled "They Call Him Dr. Death" that really does a good job of summarizing how slapdash a lot of his analyses are, right? And this is based on reporting about like how he worked that became a part of this Supreme Court case. "He believes that during an hour of examining a defendant's past and searching for remorse, he can determine the likelihood of future violence. Some prisoners really get their rocks off telling you about these horrible crimes, he says. In a few cases, Grigson has offered an opinion without conducting an

• 53:47Robert Evans?

  interview, relying only on the suspect's record. With enough evidence and arrests, he maintains, you can show where a person is coming from. About a third of the time, the pretrial interview convinces Grigson there is hope for the defendant, and he doesn't testify for the prosecution. Dallas defense attorney Richard Anderson suggests that Grigson fills a psychological need of jurors. When they're making a life or death decision, they want to believe an individual who would do these horrible things is a different species from them. He tells them this person doesn't deserve to live. He makes a decision easier." Right?

• 54:16Speaker 02

  Right, right. It's about turning them into some other category of person like we were talking about. And he's doing it with all the rigor of a body language analyst on Fox News.

• 54:26Robert Evans?

  That's exactly it, right? But these people don't know, should they just see, well, he is a doctor, he's a psychiatrist, he must know. He's using, he's talking, you know, well about it, you know, based on me being a layman and not knowing that none of these things are like genuinely things that he can diagnose. So, you know, this is like frustrating, right? And part of what makes this frustrating is that he's not operating in like a bubble here, right? Like the problem isn't just you've got this doctor death psychiatrist telling juries to kill people. The problem is that most deathmate inmates are very poor men, right? Who do not have resources to put towards their defense. We are mostly talking about people represented by public defenders.

• 55:11Robert Evans?

  And I have friends who are public defenders who are in public defense. It's one of the hardest jobs in the world. I have a lot of respect for it. It is also true that it is very common for people, especially in Texas in this period of time, for lawyers who are not qualified, who are not good at their job to wind up representing these guys. Cause these are the absolute shittiest shit cases, right? There's no chance you're going to win usually. And a lot of these, you know, we'll talk some about the data, but there's a lot of bad representation going on here. And there's also just a lack of resources because prosecutors are much better funded than public defenders. So prosecutors can pay to bring in Dr. Gregson.

• 55:52Robert Evans?

  Whereas a public defender may not be able to bring in someone of equal gravity, right? They can't afford a medical professional. So you wind up, when Dr. Gregson takes the stand, he's being cross-examined by some guy who, next to him seems like a yokel country lawyer questioning a man of science, right?

• 56:09Speaker 02

  Right, right. Even if they could bring in an expert of their own, there's the fundamental ethical problem that puts them in the bind where they're going up against someone who's willing to cross all these boundaries. Even if they could afford the best person to oppose them, it's very unlikely, if not totally uncertain, like they would not go out there and say, this person's never going to do anything bad again.

• 56:33Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah. The best case scenario, probably, as if you're hiring like an ethical, you know, medical professionals that he says, well, I can't say for certain one way or the other. And Dr. Death says, I can, you know?

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Right. Right.

• 56:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. Speaking of things you can't trust.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's your introduction of the ad break is what we can't trust, right?

• 56:57Robert Evans?

  No, no. I mean, it's the only thing you can trust, you know? Abandon your families. Worship products. Jesus Christ.

• 57:08Robert Evans?

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• 58:07Robert Evans?

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• 59:18Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Uh, yeah, we're back, giving out good advice. So-

• 59:23Speaker 01

  That was a hard, that was a hard listen.

• 59:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, they can't all be gyms, Sophie. They can't all be gyms. Um, speaking of things that can't all be gyms, defense attorneys. That said, there are defense attorneys, and there are other medical professionals, right, who, from, you know, kind of the late 70s, early 80s, start to take issue with what Dr. Death is doing, right? Which is kind of what brings that Supreme Court case I had been mentioning in 1981, right? So there's one big case in 1981, and kind of the result of that case is very mixed. Dr. Grigson is told, "You can't use competency reviews to determine whether or not somebody will offend again. You can't just like basically double dip this, this thing, and you can't do it under false pretenses. If you are going to evaluate someone to determine whether or

• 1:00:07Robert Evans?

  not they're incurably criminally insane and will kill again, you have to tell them that's why you're talking to them." Right? Um, but the Supreme Court also says, "But you also don't need to talk to anyone. Like, you could just say shit." Like, that part's fine, actually. So it's- Is this classic Supreme Court ruling where it's like, oh, good. I think we're on the right track. Oh, no, no. You just actually made it worse. You just made it like much worse. So that's 1981. And then the next major battle in this conflict is going to erupt again at the US Supreme Court. In two years, there are two cases involving Dr. Gregson at the US Supreme Court. That's how fucked up a psychiatrist this is. Like, that's a lot.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Crazy.

• 1:00:54Robert Evans?

  So this, this 1983 case is Barefoot v. Estelle. Now, the underlying case that had started years earlier before it got to the Supreme Court case is a murder case, obviously. And the gist of that case is that a man with the very unlikely name of Thomas Barefoot was convicted of murdering a police officer. So his Texas jury has to determine whether or not he should-

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Not Barefoot.

• 1:01:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, fucking, what a weird name, Thomas Barefoot. So he goes to, he gets convicted. And so after he's convicted, a jury has to decide, do we death penalty this motherfucker? And obviously, it comes down to that future dangerousness question once again. And two psychiatrists are brought in to give their opinions. And one of those psychiatrists is Dr. Gregson. By this point in the early 80s, what had started, you know, Gregson had been not maybe the only guy starting it, but, but the major one. It's a cottage industry right now, you know? And both Gregson and his colleague are kind of in lockstep. Neither of them talk to Barefoot. Neither of them are asked to talk to Barefoot. And this does not stop them from both diagnosing him. Dr. Gregson calls him a criminal sociopath.

• 1:02:00Robert Evans?

  That's his diagnosis, which is again, not a diagnosis. He then says, basically, I like to rate sociopaths on a scale of one to 10. And then says, I put Barefoot above 10. So he can't even be consistent to the logic of the made up psychiatry he's pr-. You can't say, I rate this on a one to 10 basis, and this guy is higher than 10. That's not how that works.

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  It's talking about his fucking guitar amplifier. Like, we're cranking this up to 11.

• 1:02:29Robert Evans?

  No.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  It doesn't.

• 1:02:31Robert Evans?

  Be consistent with your bullshit. If you're gonna fake make up your own system of criminal sociopathy, you can't then say, but also fuck the system I made up, you know? So I know this is gonna be hard for our listeners in the year 2025 to accept. But even though that's patently bullshit, the 1983 US Supreme Court kinda sucked ass and they ultimately upheld it.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Oh, that's so shocking to hear.

• 1:02:56Robert Evans?

  Wild. And they ultimately uphold the Texas State Court's denial of the delay of execution and wound up creating the precedent through this that it's totally fine for, again, like, this is where we kind of finally decide, yes, absolutely, a psychiatrist can just show up, never talk to a defendant and say, yeah, that guy seems crazy. Give me my money, you know? So there are, you know, again, this is like a deeply controversial thing. There's a brief filed by the APA in which they use their most doctorly language to say like, what the fuck is wrong with you people? Quote, "Psychiatrist should not be permitted to offer a prediction concerning the long-term future dangerousness of a defendant in a capital case,

• 1:03:39Robert Evans?

  at least where the psychiatrist purports to testify as a medical expert possessing predictive expertise. The large body of research in this area indicates that even under the best conditions, psychiatric predictions of long-term future dangerousness are wrong in at least two out of every three cases. The forecast of future violent conduct is at bottom a lay determination made on the basis of essentially actuarial data to which psychiatrists and psychiatrists can bring no special interpretive skills. The use of psychiatric testimony on this issue causes serious prejudice to the defendant. By dressing up the actuarial data with an expert opinion, the psychiatrist's testimony is likely to receive undue weight. It provides a false aura of certainty and impermissibly distorts the fact-finding process in capital cases."

• 1:04:21Robert Evans?

  The APA goes on to argue that it's also really fucked up for Dr. Grigson to pretend criminal sociopathy is a diagnosis because it wasn't, and it shouldn't be telling jury shit like that because it's nonsense. Diagnoses can't be made on the basis of hypothetical questions, period. And this is the only way to describe what prosecutors are asking Grigson and his colleagues to do. Yet the Supreme Court rules 6-3 on the case, and Barefoot is executed a year later at age 39. The court's ultimate reasoning is fucking stupid. They grant the APA that like, well, you're right in your criticisms of this guy. This guy's clearly like a kook and a con man, right? And you're totally right, he shouldn't be doing what he's doing. But there's nothing constitutionally impermissible about his testimony.

• 1:05:06Robert Evans?

  And it's fine because of our sacred adversarial trial process, which means that obviously if this kook is saying bullshit, another expert can be brought in to give countervailing opinions, which will leave the jury up to be the decider, you know, of truth. Even though this is a case of medical professional ethics and which they have no educational standing, right? Basically, it's fine because theoretically, another psychiatrist could come in and say he's wrong.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  Your Honor, it's my professional medical opinion that the defendant is a stinky little piss baby, and you should probably kill him. You should probably kill him. And that's my medical opinion. And then it's the responsibility of the defendants to bring in someone who's gonna say, what, that that guy's insane? But that doesn't seem to have happened either.

• 1:05:51Robert Evans?

  And I love that, like, the jury is supposed to look at these two professionals with like a dozen years of schooling each and be like, which one of them is right? Based on my experience being a guy who didn't get out of jury duty? Like, I'm not. You should, you should do jury duty, people.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  You should, you should. It's good.

• 1:06:09Robert Evans?

  So, there's so much wrong with this ruling. Like, what's, one of the things that's wildly fucked up is that the dissent is written by Justice Harry Blackmun, who is very pro-death penalty, normally. Like, a pro-death penalty justice is like, oh my God, what the fuck is wrong with the rest of you? Quote, "The court holds that psychiatric testimony about a defendant's future dangers is admissible despite the..." Fact that such testimony is wrong two times out of three. The court reaches this result even in a capital case because it is said the testimony is subject to cross examination and impeachment. In the present state of psychiatric knowledge, this is too much for me. One may accept this in a routine lawsuit for money damages, but when a person's life is at stake, no matter how heinous his offense, a requirement of greater reliability should prevail.

• 1:06:53Robert Evans?

  In a capital case, the specious testimony of a psychiatrist, colored in the eyes of an impressionable jury by the inevitable untouchability of a medical specialist's words, equates with death itself.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:07:05Robert Evans?

  Pretty good. It's a pretty good dissent. That's not a bad one.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  And you know, I appreciate that he's willing to acknowledge all kinds of clowning that goes on in your standard court of law. Nonsense arguments being deemed, we can handle that. It's fine. We'll give it a pass. But when it comes, yeah, when it comes to killing somebody, that's insane.

• 1:07:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's fucking nuts.

• 1:07:29Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. It reminds me, I watched with a friend of mine who's in the public, who is a public defender. Uh, a while back, the movie and justice for all with Al Pacino, which I have been told is the best movie about a public defender ever made. And people should definitely watch it. Like there's, there's some really good Pacino-ing going on in that one. And he is like at peak Pacino.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Peak Pacino.

• 1:07:54Robert Evans?

  Peak Pacino. Look at him. He's a little bitty guy. He's a little baby in this movie.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  So cute.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  We love a small, angry Italian man.

• 1:08:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, just a tiny furious Italian man. We don't have enough of those in our, who's our angriest Italian movie star today?

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I think that era is over, unfortunately.

• 1:08:14Robert Evans?

  That's tragic.

• 1:08:14Speaker 02

  I can't, they all changed their names. You know, these days we, we only have angry Italian politicians and none of them are particularly good.

• 1:08:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah. See, we need, Hollywood needs more DEI, which is of course dramatic Italian inclusion.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  We're working on that. We're working.

• 1:08:33Robert Evans?

  Working on that.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  That was not it. That was not it. You did not get the letters correct there, buddy.

• 1:08:38Robert Evans?

  It's fine. It was close enough.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  I was rooting for you.

• 1:08:41Robert Evans?

  It was close enough.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  We just have a lot of tiny men in Hollywood and none of them happen to be angry or Italian though.

• 1:08:48Robert Evans?

  It's tragic.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Robert Evans?

  Well, anyway, everybody, uh, figure that out. Uh, find me an angry little Italian man. Steven, you got anything to plug?

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think, you know, if you haven't listened to the viral Texas series I did for Cool Zone, on It Could Happen Here, please go listen to that. I just wrote something angry for MSNBC about the awful catastrophic Texas flood.

• 1:09:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Jesus.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  And that has a lot of preventable deaths that were totally unnecessary because it's too expensive to prevent people from dying in places where floods are common and historically known to kill people.

• 1:09:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  So, uh, yeah, check that stuff out. And, um, I guess, you know, there's one question I neglected to ask, or I don't think you got into, Robert. What, was there anything in common that a lot of these people, um, that Dr. Death testified against? Did they have anything in common? Like, was there a thread? I mean, were they of a lot of different races?

• 1:09:51Robert Evans?

  Tended to be poor. Now, they're not all. In fact, one of his really, like, major cases that we'll talk about next, uh, episode is, uh, like, a, he, it's a white guy that he gets on death row, right? As the result of, like, the actual murder lying about it, you know? So like, it, it's not entirely, but like, yes, his cases match with the general trend in Texas death row, which is that black and Hispanic men are overrepresented.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  Right. There's a long history of, like, trumped up cases involving poor black men in Dallas that may or may not involve death row cases.

• 1:10:26Robert Evans?

  Yes, he is, he is a standard matter, more than a quarter of Texas death row cases he testifies on during the several decades that he is involved in it. And as a general, as a rule, the evidence I've seen suggests that it matched the broader demographic problems. And I'm not, we're not going to go into a ton of detail on that, just because, like, the, the issues with the death penalty are broader in that. But yes, like, his, his, his issues certainly do not escape the overall bias of the system. Like, they are part of, you know, they, they sort of are in line with the overall biases of the system. It would be fair to say, yeah. And, yeah, overwhelmingly, though, like, the, the number-

• 1:11:07Robert Evans?

  Number one thing that these folks have in common is that they are very poor and have very little access to any kind of legal resources, right? Because a big part of this is that a lot of these folks are going to be shown, or at least heavily suggested to have been innocent after their conviction. That's what we'll be talking about in part two. And a big part of why that happens, it's obviously not separate from race and neither is poverty, but it's because the whole legal system in Texas is set up to make it very easy to kill poor people, even when it's known and it's known by the police and the prosecutor that they've got the wrong person and they're just kind of doing it for numbers, right? Like, well, fuck it, no one's gonna stop us from killing this guy, right? That's a recurring trend here.

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  Crazy. Well, on that note, thanks for having me to talk about such lovely topics.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Uplifting.

• 1:11:59Robert Evans?

  Yes, uplifting.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Feeling good.

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I'm feeling so much better.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  Everything's fine.

• 1:12:07Robert Evans?

  Everything's fine.

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  I feel less awful now, thanks, thanks, Robert.

• 1:12:11Robert Evans?

  Thank you. All right, everybody, go to hell. I love you.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  We'll be back for part two.

• 1:12:17Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  Bye-bye.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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