Morristown, New Jersey

Recently, the New York Times assessed the value of the Helmsley real estate empire at about $50-$60 billion. Why, then, did Leona steal a million dollars or so by casting personal expenditures as business expenses—a figure so piddling in light of their net worth that the Times predicted the family would "not have to liquidate even a small part of its holdings" in order to pay any fines arising from Leona's conviction? The crime was clearly an act of irrationality on Leona's part, like a millionaire shoplifting. It should be obvious to any trained clinician that Leona is suffering from addiction to greed, a compulsion to extract financial advantage in the most trivial ways, even when the potential gain has no possible impact on her well-being.

This would probably have been the most successful defense her lawyers could have presented in court. Indeed, Leona's failure to claim she was addicted could be used as proof that she is addicted, since one of the primary traits of addictive diseases is "denial" that one has the disease of addiction. Denial might also have been the reason Joel Steinberg disregarded his attorney's advice to claim that cocaine addiction caused him to kill his "adopted" daughter, Lisa. However, although the addiction defense was not formally presented to the jury, some jurors later said they did not vote for the more serious murder charge (Steinberg was convicted of manslaughter) because the killer had been using cocaine for so long they felt his judgment was impaired.

Some killers have subsequently rethought their failure to use addiction defenses, and have appealed their convictions on this basis. Jean Harris was one such person. Shana Alexander, in her book Very Much a Lady, presented the case that Ms. Harris was suffering from amphetamine withdrawal when she shot Dr. Herman Tarnower several times point blank. Alternately, of course, Harris could have claimed that she was driven to kill by the mental abuse Tarnower perpetrated—a variation on the battered-woman syndrome—or that she was distraught from his waning love for her, a case of withdrawal from love addiction. If these diseases caused Harris to kill Tarnower, the argument is, then her "denial" of these diseases would also prevent her from relying on the diseases as a defense strategy. (Jean Harris's appeal in this case was unsuccessful.)

In these crimes, the evidence for addiction is the puzzling nature of the crime itself—why do well-to-do or educated people kill or steal without any possibility of gaining anything of real value for themselves? Think about petty shoplifting in a store like Bloomingdale's. Like Leona Helmsley, most of those who shoplift in fashionable department stores do not materially alter their lives by their theft. Rather, they shoplift because they want something badly but may have forgotten their wallets, or their spouses have been checking their credit-card receipts to uncover unwise impulse purchases, or it just makes them feel good to get something for nothing. Really, the motivations to steal are not that different for the well-off financially and the poor. A robber or a drug dealer can often get a job and a decent lifestyle, only this would involve more work for less gain, and the thief prefers the thrills and rewards of the criminal lifestyle.

Why people make these choices may be interesting grist for criminological study. But it is irrelevant to law and punishment. As the proliferation of crime-causing diseases makes obvious, there are a host of motives that feed into people's stealing, killing, drug-taking, etc. We have laws against these behaviors because they are wrong and because it is hard to manage a society when people (as more and more do) readily satisfy their personal urges at the expense of others. And trying to assess the combination of motives that drives people to commit crimes serves primarily to invite the more resourceful criminals to present the most saleable excuses for their misbehavior.

The starkest example of a crime that shocks and puzzles us so much as to stand as an excuse for itself is infanticide. The typical defense in such a case—one that has now been recognized in several trials—is "postpartum depression." The essential logic of this defense is "What sane person would kill her own newborn child?" Relying on this defense in 1988, pediatric nurse Ann Green was acquitted in New York of all criminal charges for killing two of her newborn babies and trying to kill a third. Note that Green's condition extended well after the births of her three children, since she then had to cover up the crimes, become pregnant, and kill (or try to kill) again. Apparently, though, those who accept or even promote the postpartum defense find it hard to comprehend such heinous crimes as crimes—to do so is simply too staggering. After a California court exonerated a 24-year-old woman who had argued that she was suffering from "baby blues" [or postpartum psychosis] when she ran her automobile over her infant son and then left the body in a trash can, her family stood and applauded the verdict in the courtroom.

Of course, allowing postpartum blues to excuse those who kill or maim their children seems to counteract the current campaign against family violence in America. That is, at the same time as we strive to uncover and reduce child abuse, we broaden the legal excuses for parents who abuse their children—in particular those who kill them. This is a considerable number of people—103 children died at the hands of their parents in New York City (two a week) in 1987; 126 (10 a month) were killed by their parents in 1988. While the Steinberg case attracted much attention because of the middle-class status of the parents, it was the exceptional case: how much have you heard about the other 102 children aside from Lisa Steinberg who died in New York at the hands of their parents or guardians in 1987, the large majority of whom were minorities and/or poor?

The History of the Idea of Addiction

America is clearly moving into the 21st century in addictionology—the identification and explication of new addictions, defined as diseases. These addictions include, in addition to the standard drugs and alcohol, shopping and debt, sex and love, gambling, smoking, overeating, and just about anything people can do to excess: there are now AA-type support groups organized around several hundred types of activities. The crucial first step of the 12-step program that AA and its derivatives have made famous is the obligation for the alcoholic or addict to admit he or she is "powerless over alcohol" or any other addictive habit. This is central to the disease and AA focus on loss of control as the definition, the etiology, and the excuse for addiction and addictive misbehavior.

Actually, it is not science that is fueling the movement to label so many activities as comprising addictions. The tendency to see addictions as all being of a single cloth returns us to nineteenth-century (and earlier) usage, where to "addict" meant to be given over to a vice or activity in some unwholesome and morally reprehensible or weak-willed way. The observation that alcoholism (called inebriation and drunkenness in the last century) and drug addiction are items in a much larger class of human behavior is a fundamental realization that has been accepted throughout most of human history, but which American addictionologists have only recently been rediscovering.