Joseph Wesbecker: A Life of Adversity and Tragedy - Essay Sample

Introduction

The shooter Joseph Wesbecker was born in April 1942, but only one year after his birth, his father died while his mother was sixteen years old. Joseph Wesbecker was brought up by his sixteen old single mothers and her family. During his tender age, Joseph could always be passed from different places with at one time taken to an orphanage for a year. When Joseph Wesbecker was twenty years old, he started working with Kentucky, a printing company that had been started in 1922 ((MARVASTI, & FRIEL., 2019). Cases of reduced revenues in the Kentucky company caused the freeze of the employees' salaries and wages, which caused stress and difficulties in the lives of many employees of the company Wesbecker included. Although Joseph Wesbecker got married to two wives and had two sons, the stress he was suffering from his workplace made him divorce his two wives. In 1989, Joseph was given a disability leave from his job at the Standard Gravure after working with the printing company for seventeen years. Mr. Joseph Wesbecker had even won a case he had filed with one of the human rights commissions confirming that the discrimination that was meted to him from the printing company was a result of his psychological problems. After divorcing his wives and going through a series of stress at his workplace, Joseph was diagnosed with depression that had made him attempt suicide on several occasions.

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In his life, Joseph was going through a series of hard times. In his working place, he had a feeling that he was being mistreated by his supervisors, which made him divorce his two wives. The divorce made him develop emotional problems making his attempt to commit suicide against his own life several times. Joseph went on to commit another crime in 1989, as an unhappy worker of a printing company who was suffering from mental problems, he attacked the Standard-Gravure company armed with an Ak-47 with rounds of ammunition killing eight people and wounding twelve others (MARVASTI, & FRIEL., 2019). Later, he pulled the pistol from his belt and shot himself in the head. Through the attack and the subsequent killings, Joseph robbed the victims of their ability to walk and to enter crowded rooms. After the killings, the police chief in the city called for the banning of assault weapons arguing that people did not need any weaponry unless they were policemen or criminals.

Also, Eli Lilly and Company were charged to have committed an offense of giving Prozac to Wesbecker that was suspected of having been the reason why he made the attacks. For example, the people who had been wounded during the attack and the relatives of those who were murdered at the Standard Gravure attack filed a case against the Eli Lilly company, the company that had manufactured Prozac that was suspected of having contributed to the actions that Joseph committed ((MARVASTI, & FRIEL., 2019). The families of the victims suspected the use of Prozac to have been the cause of the killings because the offender committed the crime one month after he had started using Prozac, which was used as the aspirin of anti-depressants.

There had been a series of research on psychology concerning issues relating to statistical against clinical predictions of results. Recently, there had been researches on forensic mental fitness evaluation that has depicted wide inconsistency in decision making among the professionals concerning forensic. For example, an examination that had been conducted in the US showed the rate of incompetency views on sixty clinicians from two states in the US who had done more than 7000 reports of forensic evaluation (Zapf et al.,2018). Despite the rates of incompetency in the Us being 25%, the research found a greater range of incompetency that ranged from (0%-62%). This incompetence in the evaluators' rates relating to forensic could be attributed to several causes that could include referral stream and case difficulty. The studies that relates to field reliability that examines the consistency between people evaluating an incident for a similar defendant have found reasonable levels of agreement. Two variabilities have been established in the forensic domains, which include one that results from the absence of reliability and another that results due to biased effects. In forensic, reliability is the consistency of performance by the expert grounded on the relevant available evidence without bias. On the other hand, biasibility is the making of a decision that is affected by unrelated information. In the forensic domain, variability is related to reliability and biasibility (Zapf et al.,2018).

There are always some dangers for bias to influence forensic assessments either when it comes to the outcomes or when interpreting the measures used when doing the evaluation. The forensic evaluators, therefore, need to know the risk of bias when doing a forensic evaluation and therefore take measures to minimize or reduce it. In the case that the Lilly company had been prosecuted for manufacturing a drug that made Wesbecker commit the killings, the case is not about the manufacture and usage of Prozac (MARVASTI, & FRIEL., 2019). From the evidence presented, the drug is found to be relatively safe for human use. In this case, a biased forensic was conducted where the plaintiffs and the lawyers that represented them in the court were given some payments so that they could pull out their claims so that Lilly, the defendant in the case, could get a favorable judgment. The lawyers of the Lilly company managed to table a shred of evidence showing that the Wesbecker history of mental problems was that of a person who could commit a crime with or without the use of Prozac. The lawyers of the company argued that victory in the case in favor of the company would discourage other lawsuits that were based on unreliable and biased forensic assessments and variabilities.

References

MARVASTI, J. A., & FRIEL, S. L. (2019). Psychiatric Diagnoses and Medications: Do They Cause Gun Violence? CONNECTICUT MEDICINE, 114.

Zapf, P. A., Kukucka, J., Kassin, S. M., & Dror, I. E. (2018). Cognitive bias in forensic mental health assessment: Evaluator beliefs about its nature and scope. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 24(1), 1.