The Psychology of Junior Sniper Lee Malvo

The defense psychiatrist for the D.C. sniper, Lee Malvo, claims that Malvo was unable to distinguish right from wrong. In other words, he didn't know that it was wrong to shoot innocent people at gas stations and department stores.

Why not? Not because he was psychotic or schizophrenic, meaning completely out of touch with reality (in which case he would not have executed these shootings so competently). Instead, we're supposed to believe that he was so "pathologically loyal" to the elder sniper John Muhammad that he couldn't help but start shooting people.

There is no such thing as a psychological disorder which leads people to become so loyal that they're willing to kill. It's conjecture and excuse-making taken to a nearly incomprehensible extreme. Did it ever occur to the defense psychiatrist that Malvo's loyalty was not to Muhammad but to his own irrational, twisted code of values?

Lee Malvo is a young adult who chose his ideas and "value" system and acted upon those beliefs in an unspeakably evil way. He made no attempt to escape Muhammad and, as the prosecution points out, twice ran away from his mother to be with his hero, the equally violent and evil John Muhammad.

The state of contemporary psychiatry is astonishing. Most young adults are held responsible for not doing drugs and for getting their homework done on time. Yet if they open fire upon innocent people in a vicious, planned and calculated way, psychiatrists conclude "It can't be real. They can't mean it. They must be disordered."

Why can't the psychiatric profession accept that some people simply make evil choices?

Dr. Michael Hurd is a psychotherapist, life coach and author of Effective Therapy (New York: Dunhill, 1997) and Grow Up America! Visit his website at: www.DrHurd.com.