Can the way murder suspects express themselves through art be used as courtroom evidence? A Tallahassee researcher has found the answer to be a resounding “yes.”
It all began about seven years ago when David Gussak got a phone call from a lawyer in the Midwest. It involved a capital murder case.
“The defendant was on trial for murdering a child – his child – and the attempted murder of the other child. And he had done a great deal of art work over many, many years, and they had the idea that this art work that he had done over all those years might give them some information they could use," he says.
Gusssak heads the Department of Art Education at Florida State University and is considered one of the nation’s top authorities on art therapy and its link to the criminal justice system.
At first, Gussak turned down the request because he thought a forensic art therapist was better suited for the case. But the attorney said a prominent forensic art therapist had recommended Gussak for the job, so Gussak was pretty much on the hook to check out the defendant’s artwork for signs of mental incapacity.
“They sent me a CD file that contained more than 100 images and, over the span of several weeks and doing a lot of research, I came to the conclusion that he may have schizophrenia with a mood disorder and he may have had this over the 20 years," he says.
Gussak’s assessment was later corroborated by several mental health experts who testified during the trial.
“And the judge basically said that the court recognized that he had a mental illness. They were still going to give him 95 years and he deserved all 95 of those years, but he deserves mental health care also while he was in prison because the entire time this went unchecked," he says.
The experience led Gussak to write his new book, “Art on Trial: Art Therapy in Capital Murder Cases.” He says even the publisher, Columbia University Press, found it a real page-turner.
“They said chapters one through five read like a "CSI" episode, whereas the other chapters I went back and interviewed the defense attorneys, the prosecuting attorney whose job it was to make me look like an idiot, the judge, other art therapists who have been involved in murder trials, and I used that information to really support the underlying concept that art and art therapy can be used as a defense in a criminal and/or violent murder trial," he says.
And Gussak says – rarity of rarities – he finds himself with a scholarly book that even non-scholars are enjoying.
“It’s certainly generated a great deal of interest outside of the art therapy field, even outside of the forensics and criminology fields, although it’s also starting to generate a lot of interest there," he says. "But it’s also branching out, and a lot of people who know nothing about any of these fields have been reading it and enjoying it because of the way it’s written. They just find it intriguing.”
Gussak and his work will be at the Florida State University Bookstore on Woodward Avenue next Thursday, Dec. 5, at 7 p.m. He also plans to speak and host a discussion about the use of art as a way to get inside the minds of criminal suspects.
