ABSTRACT
Sutcliffe would never have been exposed to the public milieu of a juried trial if the judge at the initial hearings had not expressed his dissatisfaction over what he called a “conflict” between certain statements made earlier by Sutcliffe to the police, and others made later in the course of psychiatric investigation. Up to this point in the proceedings, it was generally assumed that the defense plea for diminished responsibility on Sutcliffe’s behalf would be accepted, a plea which drew upon the testimony of four psychiatrists that the defendant was a paranoid schizophrenic: that he had manifested four of the eight classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia; in short, that he was not bad, but merely mad.
