Giving Evil the Eye

The search for absolute evil is as old as mankind. No one has ever pinned down what it is, either as a theological concept or as a physical act. Welner would like to pin it down as a legal concept.

The Bible posits it existed in the world with Adam and Eve but not much more is apparent. The New Catholic Encyclopedia: "There is no precise articulation of the nature of evil in the creeds of the church, nor is there any explicit or definitive doctrine of evil."

Descartes wrestled with the idea of the "Evil Genius" before deciding the only thing one could be sure of was consciousness ("I think, therefore I am"). Kant had the idea of "radical evil" corrupting the categorical imperative. Buddhism is non-dualistic, but still has Mara, the god of evil and destruction. Atheists generally say that evil is not due to God giving man free will (a popular explanation of the religious crowd) but because there is no God at all.

The theology department at Georgetown University has a required course titled "The Problem of God." It asks the eternal question: "What is evil?" Department Chairman Terrence Reynolds says the question is more interesting than the answer, primarily because there isn't one.

"It's probably true that in the modern age we don't like behavior to go completely unexplained," Reynolds says in a telephone interview. "We like to reduce profoundly aberrant behavior to some chemical or neurological agent, but evil can transcend attempts to define it. . . . I'm not afraid of mystery in life, and evil to me is part of that mystery."

Welner is going to keep trying to solve that mystery, at least for the legal system.

Upbeat, enthusiastic, 42, handsome, cleanshaven, recently married, child of Pittsburgh, son of a nurse and an engineer. He's an associate professor of psychiatry at the New York University medical school and chairman of the Forensic Panel, a 30-member organization of medical and forensic scientists that consults on court cases.

His fascination with human evil started a decade ago, when he was editing a journal called the Forensic Echo, which tracked public policy, psychiatric research and court decisions. He noticed there was a steady stream of traffic from trial to appellate courts about what constituted the worst of crimes.

This matters because prosecutors and defense attorneys spar over technical matters such as jury instructions, and aggravating and mitigating circumstances -- all of which determine the punishment for the crime in question.

Intrigued by how different states wrestled with the concept of evil, he went through more than 100 appellate decisions that upheld crimes as being, say, "especially heinous." He worked backward to the underlying psychiatric diagnosis of the perpetrator -- malignant narcissism, psychopathy, necrophilia -- to produce a chart of psychiatric conditions involved in the worst types of crimes.

"What this research does is force the people who are arguing the case to explain to a jury, in an evidence-driven way, 'What is it about this crime that makes it evil?' If it's obvious, then the evidence will bear it out," Welner says. "Do we find that a person who flays the skin off someone's face after they have passed away, ergo disrespect for the victim after the fact . . . do we as a society agree that that should distinguish a crime as depraved?"

Welner calls his developing taxonomic standard of evil the Depravity Scale. It's a chart, divided into sections that separate the intents, actions and behaviors of the sadistic and the sick. These get rated: very depraved, somewhat depraved, not so much. Welner has also developed a scientific questionnaire that asked people to rate various types of crimes into more or less depraved to see if there was broad consensus.