Go to sleep dear, it's time to have sex
'Sexsomnia' occurs more often than we think, says an Ottawa doctor
A nightclub bouncer arrived in Dr. Paul Fedoroff's office after his wife complained he was constantly trying to have sex with her when she was asleep. ...
Thus began the Ottawa psychiatrist's research into a bizarre new disorder that he and other Canadian psychiatrists have dubbed "sexsomnia" -- people who engage in sexual behaviour while asleep. They believe the disorder should be recognized as a new "clinical entity" and warn it is far more prevalent than doctors suspect.
At first glance, this struck me as funny as anything to come out of the Weekly World News; but almost instantly, I was deeply disturbed by this thought: Doing strange things while sound asleep -- including "aimless wandering, carrying objects from one place to another for no apparent reason, furniture rearranging, inappropriate eating, urinating in closets, going outdoors," driving a car, and, yes, sexual activity (which can "run the gamut from moaning to rape-like behavior and violent masturbation that leaves bruising or soreness") -- is certainly unusual, but hardly anything "new." (Even Shakespeare utilized the phenomenon; Lady MacBeth is sound asleep when she confesses to murder and repeatedly tries to wash the blood off her hands.)
So why call it a "bizarre new disorder"? The only thing "new" about it is the name.
What's bothersome about heralding this particular form of parasomnia as some groundbreaking "new" discovery is its potential implication in sexual-assault and abuse cases.
Fortunately, the potential for exploiting "sexsomnia" as a means of a legal defense is not lost on minds clearer than those of the "pioneering" shrinks, who acknowledge (but appear to dismiss):
...several cases of men who were charged with sexually assaulting their partners, or even their own children. All were "exculpated" after doctors found evidence of sexsomnia, and the study suggests cases of alleged sexual molestation should be investigated for evidence of the sleep sex disorder -- a prospect that alarms groups who work with sex assault victims.
They fear that if sexsomnia winds up in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, the "bible" doctors use to identify psychiatric illnesses, the new diagnosis could provide a convenient way for a sex offender to avoid a prison term.
"This thing will create just another loophole for men to get through," says Debbie King, executive director of the Kitchener-Waterloo Sexual Assault Support Centre. "They'll say: 'Oh, but I did it in my sleep.' " ...
"The key issue here is if a person is asleep, there's precedent in law the person is not responsible for their behaviour," says [Dr. Colin Shapiro, lead author of the report].
That precedent was set in Canada in 1987, when Kenneth Parks got up from his couch in Pickering, Ont., after falling asleep, got in his car, drove 23 kilometres to his mother-in-law's house, and then stabbed her and beat her to death with a tire iron. Mr. Parks said he was sleepwalking and was acquitted.
The 11 cases of sexsomnia Dr. Shapiro's team report in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry are not nearly so shocking, but disturbing nonetheless... While all of the men who were charged were cleared, Dr. [Paul] Fedoroff, co-director of the sexual behaviours clinic at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, acknowledges it's impossible to know for certain whether they were truly asleep.
But he has assessed men who have been charged with sexual assault who display no signs or symptoms of sexually deviant behaviour, but who in sleep studies show clear signs of a parasomnia, such as sleepwalking and talking, "which are all pretty tough to fake," Dr. Fedoroff says. Sexsomnia "simply raises the possibility of another explanation."
Go to sleep dear, it's time to have sex
Ottawa Citizen
June 22, 2003
Excuse me? Sleepwalking and talking "are all pretty tough to fake"? You're the one who's asleep, Doc; if Hillside Strangler Kenneth Bianchi could get away with fooling even one shrink with his shoddy multiple-personality act (which he did), and would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley could manipulate his own psychiatrists to coach him through faking shizophrenia (which, fortunately, didn't hold up in court), you're going to have a hard time convincing me that it takes an Edward Norton to fake a sleep disorder. (We don't, after all, monitor the brainwaves of murderers in the act.)
Now, I'm not suggesting that automatism ("acting out" during sleep) is never a valid defense; it most certainly can be. I'm more concerned about the potential for its abuse. There have, for example, been certain landmark cases in which a defendant's acquittal of murder thanks to the defense of "homicidal sonambulism" (or "sleep murder") is positively astounding.
Take Steven Steinberg, a Scottsdale, Arizona, man who in 1981 stabbed his wife 26 times, then told police she had been killed by burglars. But the evidence was against Steinberg; he went to trial, and was acquitted on the defense that he had killed his wife in his sleep. The verdict: Not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Now, I'm no shrink, but if Steinberg had no memory of what he had done (at least, he said he didn't), what does his need to make up a "burglary" story say to you?
Just as disturbing is the inequity in which the somnabulism defense is deemed valid. In a remarkably similar 1999 case, Scott Falater, another Arizona man, stabbed his wife 44 times, dragged her body to the swimming pool, held her head underwater, and then hid his bloodied clothes, changed into pajamas, and bandaged an injured hand -- all while purportedly sound asleep.
The difference between the two cases is that, despite strong testimony supporting the sleepwalking defense (from the same trio of experts who helped acquit Kenneth Parks in 1992), Falater was convicted, and today is serving out a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Steinberg's defense attorney, Robert Hirsch, told The Arizona Republic: "Times have changed. I don't think anybody could sell it (a sleepwalking defense) today. It's a process that I think America has gone through. People don't believe in any mental-state defenses. It didn't matter whether he was sleepwalking or not."
Sounds like a case of sour grapes from a lawyer who's just lost a case, but there's a seed of truth in Hirsch's assessment: Jurors are generally wary of any "mental-state defense," and inclined to assume that the defendant is faking it.
Nevertheless, the sonambulism defense has resulted in the acquittals of several other high-profile "sleepwalking" criminals since the Steinberg conviction:
- In January, 2001, Richard Overton was cleared of two sexual-assault charges (although convicted of of child endangerment and child abuse) stemming from a 1998 incident in which he claims he suddenly awoke in the bed of a seven-year-old girl.
- In May, 2001, 19-year-old Adam Kieczykowski entered dorm rooms at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, sexually assaulted ten female students, and stole items from some of them. He was acquitted on 18 different charges, "mark[ing] the first time in 156 years that the "sleepwalking defense" had been used successfully in Massachusetts."
- In April, 2003, Marc Reider, 24, was acquitted of aggravated manslaughter in the 1999 head-on-crash death of a 39-year-old woman, because Reider was deemed to have been "sleep-driving."
As interesting as these cases may be, both "sleep crime" and its use as a legal defense are extremely rare; one estimate is that the sleepwalking defense has only "been raised in 20 to 30 murder trials worldwide."
But it is likely that, should Drs. Fedoroff and Shapiro reap the kind of accolades they seek with the announcement of their "new" sleep disorder, the "sleepwalking defense" will become more common.
And that's dangerous, for two reasons:
First, it does provide an all-too-easy out for accused sexual assailants, especially in the absence of evidence showing premeditation. Had Scott Falater not been spotted by a neighbor "dragging the body to the pool, putting on gloves, removing his bloodstained clothes and hiding them and the knife in his Volvo," he might have gotten away with the sleepwalking defense in the murder of his wife. Without similar evidence of premeditation and deliberation against an accused "sleep-rapist," the burden of proof that the defendant was not sleepwalking will fall on the victim of the assault. Perhaps that's legally appropriate, but should the onus fall on the victim to prove anything more than that the crime was committed, and that the defendant was the one who committed it?
Second, used indiscriminately, the sleepwalking defense will jeopardize legitimate cases in which parasomnia, and not the sufferer, is to blame. As mentioned earlier, it's tough enough trying to prove that a defendant was under the influence of any disorder, because jurors have grown immune to exaggerated claims of "The devil" -- or fill in the disorder of your choice here -- "made me do it." There's been a ongoing backlash against the American "society of victims," and that works very much against legitimate "mental-state" defenses.
Will "The sandman made me do it" become the new national joke? As Ayako Kado & Larry Fisher wrote in their oft-quoted paper, Sleepwalking – Nightmare for the courts:
The new dilemma is that various kinds of legal defense such as sleepwalking are firmly supported by medical evidence. The justice system is faced with a medically excusable defense that has the potential of being abused. In fact, Dr. Kryger writes, "The potential for sleep disorder to become the Twinkie defense of the 21st century is frightening"...
Related articles:
Sleepwalk to Murder
About.com
When the Brain Disrupts the Night
New York Times, January 7, 2003
Sleep Violence Wake-Up Call
The Forensic Echo, October 1, 1997
Can sleepwalking be a murder defense?
Lawrence Martin, M.D., 2002
Sleep Disorder Cases On The Rise / Can Sleep Woes Be a Defence in Court?
Straits Times Asia, October 22, 2002
Psycho Therapists / Great Psycho Excuses
Stuff, May, 2001
King v. Cogdon (1950): "[T]he defendant stabbed her daughter to death while she was dreaming that the Korean War was going on in her house and one of the soldiers was attacking her daughter. The psychiatric testimony suggested that her attack manifested a subconscious hostility toward her daughter..." (.PDF)
Comments
Posted Wed, 25 Jun 2003 01:28:41 GMT
LGBTBinat:
Yep I can just picture it now. All these parents are arrested on incest charges, only to be released several hours later for reasons of sleep incest?
This is bloody rediculous. While I believe it does happen to people, I do not believe that any person asleep can actually get in a car and drive around until they find someone to rape. Rape them, then go back home and get into bed.
I was always under the impression that when you sleep walk, your eyes are actually still closed, or non responsive, so how can anyone do things like that if their eyes are non responsive or closed?
Excellent article as always, DT.
Posted Wed, 25 Jun 2003 02:13:01 GMT
doublethink:
Thanks, LGBT. :)
Ah, but their eyes can indeed be open, and the sleepwalker can seem very much awake. Not "quite himself," perhaps, but seemingly lucid. I never sleepwalked as a kid (that I know of), but I could hold a full conversation while I was sound asleep -- and with my eyes wide open, too -- and never remember a single detail, even when my mother or someone would repeat the whole conversation back to me. It subsided as I grew up, which is common; when you rule out drug use (Paxil for one, I understand, can bring it on) or other disorders (e.g., there seems to be a correlation with sleep apnea), sonambulism usually doesn't develop _in_ adulthood -- which is another reason I'm suspicious of adults who claim this just started happening out of the blue.
I've also known a number of "sleep-eaters" as well -- usually women on strict diets, who would go to bed, and reappear in the kitchen hours later, up to their elbows (almost) in peanut butter, or whatever else they'd been denying themselves during waking hours.
And although I know of no correlation between parasomnia and epilepsy, I'm struck by the similarities between some parasomniacal activities and what I once witnessed while sitting through a former roommate's grand mal epileptic seizure: He certainly wasn't himself; he wandered outside (I couldn't stop him -- he was big, and uncontrollable), peed in the neighbors' bushes (along with other inappropriate things), and ultimately couldn't remember a thing he'd done when it was all over. He seemed genuinely shocked at his own behavior when I related his adventures the following day.
That's another possibility for sudden parasomnia in adulthood: brain injury -- which is sometimes (but not always) responsible for epilepsy. (My former roomie's epilepsy was brought on by a crushing blow to the skull a few years earlier.)
Anyway, it is all quite possible. But how do you weed out the legitimate cases from Oscar-worthy performances by very, very good actors?
Posted 2:04:18 PM 
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