Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Move Over Twinkie Defense

From the annals of crime comes an interesting

      Lawrence Cohen, along with two others, owned and operated a storefront business where they sold books, tapes, videos and other instructional materials explaining how to legally stop paying income taxes.  Frequently, as part of his consultation services, Cohen advised clients to file a “zero return,” a tax return with zeros placed on the income reporting lines which generate refunds if someone has had income tax withheld during the course of the year.

   The Justice Department does not take kindly to such enterprises and it charged Mr. Cohen with various federal tax and other criminal offenses; he was convicted in the District Court.  All criminal acts generally require that there be some intentional conduct and in tax crimes that intent is couched in terms of willfulness.  On appeal, Mr. Cohen argued that he did not have that requisite willfulness but that he could not prove this defense when the court precluded his psychiatric expert who had opined that Mr. Cohen suffered a “mental disease …bearing on … the issue of guilt.”

     The expert had diagnosed Mr. Cohen as suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder and concluded that he “did not intend to violate the law, as would be the case with a criminal who acted out of a desire for personal gain” but rather “[h]is behavior is driven by a mental disorder as opposed to criminal motivation…Although it is true Mr. Cohen was not delusional or psychotic and was in possession of basic mental faculties, his will was in the service of irrational beliefs as a result of narcissistic personality disorder.”  The report also noted: 

Because [Cohen’s] beliefs are fixed and have led him to significant adverse consequences, he is irrational to the point of dysfunction, demonstrated by his stubborn adherence in the face of overwhelming contradictions and knowledge of substantial penalty.  …Despite evidence to the contrary, his psychological needs dominated his mentation…This is the nature of the narcissistic personality in which the sufferer could essentially pass a lie detector test when asked commonsensical questions while giving improbable answers. 

   The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed, concluding that psychiatric expert testimony on narcissistic personality disorder is admissible to help a jury determine intent.  The Court of Appeals reasoned that the expert testimony could have helped Mr. Cohen counter the government’s arguments that he knew the “zero returns” were false because, once Mr. Cohen obtained a belief about the validity and legality of his conduct, he would cling doggedly to that belief even in the face of overwhelming contradictions. 

           So that rude patron at the next table exhibiting a socially repugnant level of narcissism while out to dinner just may be building a criminal tax fraud defense. 

John Hanamirian