Brainwashing Danger Seen

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31769, 28 August 1968, Page 13

Brainwashing Danger Seen

The proposed Criminal Justice Amendment (No. 2) Bill contains provisions for holding a person in custody without trial, without right of appeal and for treating him psychiatrically without his authority and even against his wishes, says an Auckland medical practitioner, Dr L. K. Gluckman, who strongly criticises the bill as unethical. Writing in the current issue of the New Zealand Medical Journal, he states that the following facts are established under the provisions of the bill: Accused persons can be re-

manded to psychiatric hospital before trial and without opportunity to call medical evidence. Such an accused person may be in the ultimate not guilty of the offence with which he is charged; such a person has no right of appeal. Such an accused person is a prisoner. He is not in the custody of the superintendent of the hospital, but remains in custody of the constable who arrested him, or the superintendent of the gaol from which be has been transferred. The medical superintendent cannot even place the prisoner in a ward of his own choosing. The prisoner, because he is not a patient, may be given treatment incidental to the observation. Such treatment may destroy his memory for the offence with which he is charged. Dr Gluckman says he has

described brainwashing techniques previously and confessions and spurious confessions may be obtained from the prisoner. All this has happened elsewhere, he says The history of medicine shows that doctors in many places have lacked integrity; legislation should not depend on the integrity of those who apply it. The mentally ill, above all, require adequate protection. Dr Gluckman says the provisions of the proposed bill are contrary to the great ethical traditions of medicine, and no doctor should treat a person detained as a prisoner before trial and without guilt

being established, without the prisoner’s authority. He says the theoretical danger is in the fact that people could be detained for political, social or religious views, and have these views destroyed and replaced with induced views.