Criticism
The Peace Corps has been criticized for its handling of the murder, particularly since a book on the case was published in 2005, acquainting a wider public with the details. Criticisms include that Priven's defense in Tonga was supplied by the Peace Corps, that the Peace Corps allegedly went to great efforts to bury the incident, and that Priven was not suffering from a psychiatric disorder that would have allowed him to mount a successful psychiatric defense in an American court.
In 2005, the U.S. Attorney's office in Seattle looked into the possibility of bringing charges against Dennis Priven for the murder of Deborah Gardner but concluded that Priven could not be tried in any jurisdiction in the United States. Although a 1994 law allows prosecutors to bring charges against an American citizen who kills another American citizen while overseas, and the Patriot Act allows US Courts to try Americans for crimes they may have committed while overseas, neither of these laws was in effect at the time the murder occurred in 1976 and they cannot therefore be applied retroactively to the Gardner murder case, the US Attorney's office concluded.
Although Priven's psychiatrist in his trial in Tonga testified that Priven suffered from latent paranoid schizophrenia, a panel of psychiatrists who discussed the murder as a case study in 2005 concluded that Priven was probably suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, which manifests itself as obsessive involvement with one’s own interests and lack of empathy for others, and had he been charged in an American court, he would not have been able to mount a successful defense "by reason of insanity."
Read more about this topic: Murder Of Deborah Gardner
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“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)