Dr. Jeffrey Smalldon

And so I diagnosed many people as having antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder.

In my experience, personality, severe personality disorders were the most common diagnosis among death penalty patients.

You know, some people think, well, a personality disorder, that's like that guy down the street who I can't stand, he's a jerk.

But mental health professionals use the term in a very different way.

It speaks to a very calcified, deeply ingrained personality disorder.

For example, if one of the characteristics of antisocial personality is the inability to experience empathy, well, it's a pretty big deal.

I mean, if you're not able to experience empathy- Yeah, it's a bit of a problem, eh?

A bit of a problem in the social world, and you're likely to get in trouble.

So it's not like, in my testimony, I was trying to shield the jury from really damning characteristics of the people I evaluated, but I tried not to use really incendiary words like psychopath.

It does.

And that was a big part of my job.

A lot of those death penalty cases pled out before trial, but a lot of them went to trial.

At least in the United States, what happens in a death penalty case is there's the first trial, which is

you know, what everybody knows, guilt or innocence.

And then if the person's found guilty, which they nearly always were, then the second is the sentencing or mitigation phase.

And that's basically where it's the defense's show to put on expert witnesses, testimony from family members, physicians, whatever.

And that's where I would usually come in

to tell the story that I'd learned as a result of my investigation into this person's background, usually involved not just multiple interviews, the convicted murderer and testing, but interviews with collateral informants like family members, sometimes former coaches, Cub Scout leaders, you know, whatever, to try to tell as complete a story as I could tell.

And one of the things I always emphasize is that

I was never, ever there to advocate for the defense cause.