Moral judgment: does the abuse excuse threaten our legal system?

Abstract

In 1994, I coined the term “abuse excuse” to describe the sorts of defenses raised by admitted killers and maimers, such as the Menendez brothers, Lorena Bobbitt and Colin Ferguson. I wrote a book by that name in which I argued that excuses—ranging from battered woman syndrome, to abused child syndrome, to black rage—were being abused by so called expert witnesses who employed pseudo-science to serve political agendas and to deny or mitigate personal responsibility. My central concern was that this abdication of responsibility threatened the foundations of our legal system. Imagine my surprise when, having been asked to review Professor James Q. Wilson’s 1997 book entitled Moral Judgment: Does the Abuse Excuse Threaten Our Legal System?, I discovered that Wilson—a thoughtful conservative and sometime colleague at Harvard—was making essentially the same points I had made in my