A Mind on Trial

Outside London's famed Old Bailey last week, Britons by the hundreds queued up hopefully for gallery seats. Inside the venerable courthouse, facing a jury on terms unprecedented in the long annals of English law, sat a slim, stolid, German-born Canadian immigrant named Gunther Fritz Podola.

The Podola case began last July 13, when Podola, 30, allegedly shot and killed a London cop who was trying to question him about a shakedown charge. Cornered three days later in his shabby South Kensington room, Podola was brought out to a police car looking considerably the worse for wear. Two policemen were half dragging him by the arms, and a third walked just ahead as if to keep him from pitching forward. His head was covered with a sack.

In both Parliament and the press there was an immediate outcry. "What action is being taken against the people who beat Podola unconscious?" shouted Laborite Reginald Paget in the House of Commons. Hard-bitten Fleet Street reporters chipped in to pay for Podola's defense. But when the time came for Podola's trial last week, it was neither police brutality nor ordinary insanity at the time of the crime that was offered as Podola's defense. Instead, Defense Counsel Frederick Lawton, Q.C., argued that "a very, very severe fright," possibly triggered by the events of Podola's arrest, had "brought about his loss of memory."

"Trembling & Twitching." Thereupon the case turned into a pre-trial jury hearing to decide whether Podola had actually lost his memory and so was unfit to plead guilty or not guilty of murder. Detective Albert Chambers, 6 ft. and 230 lbs., testified that to arrest Podola, he "charged [the door] with all my strength," and crashed Podola to the floor, falling "full length on top of him." When Podola recovered consciousness, said Chambers, he had ''a peculiar trembling and shaking and twitching" in his whole body.

At the Chelsea police station later, continued Chambers, Podola "looked very pitiful. His behavior was odd." Police Surgeon John Shanahan testified that when he examined Podola then, "it was impossible to make contact with him." Other police doctors told how Podola gradually began to recover, and even to volunteer remembered bits, e.g., a memory picture of a woman called Ruth, and a child called Micky he believed was theirs. Noting signs of Podola's "withdrawal," one doctor said that Podola "liked to keep near the wall when he moved along the corridor." "It is an accepted thing that distinguished scholars like to walk near the wall," observed Mr. Justice Davies. "Dr. Johnson did it all his life," volunteered Counsel Lawton amid laughter, "going along touching doorposts down Fleet Street."

When Podola himself was called to give evidence, he still had traces of a black eye, but he looked calm, perfectly at ease, rather detached. In guttural tones, he answered questions as if the answers bore no relation to his own fate. "Do you know," asked Prosecuting Counsel Maxwell Turner, leaning forward with heavy jowls jutting out, "what is the punishment for capital murder in England?" Replied Podola indifferently: "They told me in prison. Either you get off or"--he let his hand swing down from the elbow--"it will be hanging." And never once was Podola trapped into an admission of memory. Asked to explain a witness' report that he had remarked that both English and French were spoken in Montreal shops, he answered impatiently: "I don't know how I know that. I just know it."

La Belle Indifference. For the defense, Harley Street Neurologist Colin Edwards testified that Podola's patchy knowledge was in no way inconsistent with genuine loss of memory, and that only a man with a specialist's knowledge of rarely seen symptoms could fake Podola's act. Podola, he said, was "normally sane with the exception of memory loss," was suffering from "hysterical amnesia," a condition which can be characterized by "unconscious suppression" of particular memories "due to emotional causes." Might this unconscious suppression "clear up next week?" asked Mr. Justice Davies. "I think not, my lord," replied Dr. Ed wards. "That must depend, I think, on how the loss of memory or regaining his memory is likely to affect his fate."

If Podola's were a case of schizophrenia, said Edwards, he would have been 100% indifferent to everything and everybody. But the "Selective" fashion in which Podola could recall certain things from the past tended to confirm that he suffered only from hysterical amnesia. Podola, Edwards argued, was in the grip of what psychiatrists call la belle indifference--a "couldn't-care-less attitude about some things but not all things." As an example, Edwards pointed to the gesture--"absolutely incredible in a man with emotional awareness"--with which Podola had alluded to the possibility of hanging.

At week's end the Crown called Dr. Francis Busby, senior medical officer at Brixton Prison, who pronounced Podola's amnesia "definitely not genuine," and insisted that if Podola's memory really had vanished he could not have played chess and vingt-et-un with his guards without first being shown how. Podola, he said, had "deceived" Edwards and other doctors who held that he was not fit to be tried.

This week, after further testimony, Podola's twelve jurors, battered by diametrically opposed medical opinion, must make up their minds whether he is capable of participating in his own defense. If they decide that he is, he will go forward lo a trial that could end in his execution. If not, for the first time in British history, a man will escape the law's clutches on the ground that he has forgotten the crime charged against him.

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