Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis is an American psychiatrist specializing in the study of serial killers and people with Dissociative Identity Disorders (DID), formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder. Dr. Lewis has worked with death row inmates as well as other prison inmates convicted for crimes of passion and violence, and was the director of the DID clinic at Bellevue Hospital, associated with New York University (NYU) in New York City. She is a Professor of Psychiatry at Yale and New York universities and is the author of Guilty by Reason of Insanity, a book she wrote based on research done with the help of neurologist Jonathan Pincus. Her husband, Dr. Melvin Lewis, a child psychiatrist and professor at Yale, died in 2007. She has two children.
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Dr. Lewis is a graduate of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Radcliffe College and Yale University School of Medicine. During her research Dr. Lewis found that most if not all of the inmates she worked with have been abused as children. She has found that in most cases both the accused and the family members have been reluctant to discuss the abuse that happened in the past, in many cases she found that the inmates blocked out the memories.[1] In some cases she was able to find testimony to this abuse as well as corroborating evidence. The corroborating evidence often included scars from the abuse as well as hospital and criminal records. In many cases the hospital records of the abuse were attributed to other causes often accidents; however the explanations often didn't match the injuries. [2] She found that the parents of these children often had the same problems as the children and that they taught their behavior to the children. They often relied on excessive force to discipline their children and used it inconsistently. In many cases the children who received the strictest discipline became the most violent.[3] In some cases these children found that if they told other adults about the abuse, which in some cases was very extreme, they found that adults didn't believe them because the stories were too bizarre. [4]
Dr. Lewis is skeptical of the death penalty; however she wouldn't hesitate to recommend sentencing these inmates to life. She doesn't feel she could accept the responsibility if they were released and killed again. Neither Dr. Lewis nor Dr. Pincus believe the death penalty works as a deterrent. She believes that the quest for justice often leads many prosecutors, judges, jurors to overlook things that could be considered mitigating circumstances. She believes that this leads to overlooking the root causes of crime and prevents long term solutions that will help reduce child abuse and prevent more abused children from becoming killers. [5]
In 2004, she alleged that portions of British playwright Bryony Lavery's hit Broadway play Frozen were plagiarized from her book.