The court case involving Rhiannon O’Donnabhain, the 63-year-old transgendered female who is suing the Internal Revenue Service to be allowed to deduct the cost of her sex change operation, just got a little more interesting – as if that were possible!
The IRS and lawyers for O’Donnabhain sides rested their cases last week, but not before controversy arose over an expert witness for the government. Bennett Klein, one of O’Donnabhain’s lawyers, claimed that forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz, a witness for the IRS, was not trustworthy because of his false testimony in another high profile case. You may remember Dr. Dietz’ name… He is the doctor who testified in the 2002 Andrea Yates trial that an episode of the television series Law & Order depicted a woman who was acquitted by reason of insanity after drowning her children. Yates was convicted in that trial. However, no such episode of Law & Order existed, and later, Yates’ conviction was overturned.
Dietz acknowledged at trial that he had made a mistake with respect to his prior testimony. However, he insisted that with respect to this trial, “gender identity disorder” is not a disease.
The judge will ultimately decide whether the disorder is a disease. What do you think?
I think that with a million possible expert witnesses to choose from, if you’re the attorney who is stupid enough to pick one that’s already screwed up on the stand in a previous case, then you deserve to lose.
Rob, I agree!