“Medea” in the Greek Courtroom: Contesting Insanity among Jurists, Psychiatrists and the Public

Abstract

This article focuses on the case of the young American woman who killed her
three children in 1961 in Athens, attempted to commit suicide and was widely referred to
as the “Medea of Kalamaki”. Its goal is to discuss the difficulties that psychiatrists faced
in Greek courts to establish themselves as experts on matters pertaining to the mental
condition of homicide offenders, and the constant calling into question of their expertise
by the judiciary and the press alike. At the same time, the article argues that in the
particular circumstances of 1960s Greece, press crime narratives brought forward a third
factor involved in the controversy between the judiciary and the psychiatrists, namely
“public opinion”, testifying to an “enlarged publicity”. Jane Brown’s two trials attest to
the prevalence in both the judiciary and the press of the “Medea narrative” that refuted
psychiatric diagnoses of diminished or even a total lack of liability for her acts.