The United States legal system classifies wrongdoing into two categories which are criminal and civil cases. Offences against the state or the society are known as crimes and as such, are prosecuted by the state.
The criminal case that I have selected to analyze is the murder of Faith Hathaway outside of Mandeville. The incident which was under the Louisiana Supreme Court is called the STATE of Louisiana v. Robert Lee WILLIE, 436 So. 2d 553 (La. 1983).
The facts of the above crime which was filled under docket number 81-KA-0242 are as follows: On May 28, 1980, Robert Lee Willie and Joseph Vaccaro gave a lift to Faith Hathaway outside a disco called the Lakefront Theatre in Mandeville, Louisiana at approximately 4.30 a.m. Miss Hathaway, who is the victim of our case was 18 years old then, she was coming from celebrating her last night as a civilian before joining the United States Army. Robert Lee and Joseph Vaccaro the accused in this case, upon picking her up instead of driving her home to St. Tammany Parish drove her to a secluded gorge south of Franklinton where they raped the victim and stabbed her in the neck severally to her death. The accused were arrested on June 3, 1980, for unrelated crimes but admitted to raping and killing the victim. The victim’s body was found on June 10, 1980, together with a note with a message about the body’s location. The psychological approach as applied to this crime is violent because the accused raped and stabbed the victim.
The victim, in this case, played no role because she died from the attack. Nonetheless, the government is obliged to provide government officers and employees from the Justice Department to provide detection, investigation and criminal prosecution. The government is also required to provide an attorney to argue the case on the victim’s behalf. (Neubauer, 2009)
The social impact of this case is it brought fear to the community that someone could be raped and the police did not have any leads to the perpetrators. The accused were found a month later and not out of the investigation but a confession, then the investigative report was marred with inconsistencies about the note on the crime scene these factors also made the people lose faith in the investigative authorities.
There were no psychological treatments of rehabilitations that were given in this case for the accused since they were sentenced to death. However, for the families of the victim and charged trauma, counselling services would have been necessary. For the victim’s family, it would help them process and get through the loss of their daughter, and for the accused family, it would help them get through witnessing the execution of their family member.
Forensic psychologists, in this case, were used as fact witnesses to collaborate the rape and murder charges against the accused persons. These individuals helped in the selection of the jury that was involved in the case. The other important aspect of forensic psychologists is to determine the mental health of the accused persons (Petrak, 2004). In this case, the Robert Lee showed some signs of mental instability, even during his last moments just before execution he winks to the family the psychologists helped determine his mental state before the sentence was given.