How Should Society Judge a Defendant with a Brain Tumor?

After a visit from one of his patients in March, 1966, the psychiatrist Maurice Heatly noted, “This massive, muscular youth seemed to be oozing with hostility as he initiated the hour with the statement that something was happening to him and he didn’t seem to be himself.”

That patient was Charles Whitman, a 25-year-old former Marine who had recently been honorably discharged. He Heatly, who was on staff at the University of Texas Health Center, in Austin, that he’d been “thinking