At the site linked to, it says Lisa McPherson’s case was “delayed until 2004.” What more recent developments have taken place?
What documentation exists regarding other cases of harm coming from an “Introspection Rundown?”
Assuming this site http://www.whyaretheydead.net/lisa_mcpherson/introspe.htm isn’t misrepresenting the introspection RD, then the info from both sites linked to in this post seems to be sufficient for a strong suspicion that Scientology does in fact engage in incarceration and directly psychologically harmful practices during that incarceration. If they weren’t doing it, why would they have documents like these explaining how to do it, and attempting to absolve themselves of legal responsibility for it? And it would be very hard to believe Lisa McPherson constituted an isolated case of a practice that had never actually been engaged in before.
It looks like Scientology is involved in alot of lawsuits, but I’m interested in the question of criminal conduct. Have criminal charges been brought against them?
-FrL-
(I’ve put this in GD because I just know it’s going to turn GD.)
(The following is an observation which is in really poor taste. It may very well offend you. It should offend you. It’s totally wrong. It’s bad. Don’t read it. But it’s kind of funny.
It strikes me that “Lisa McPherson and the Introspection Rundown” could make for a good band name.
No term of a contract is enforceable in court if it is illegal or otherwise “contrary to public policy.” In particular, you cannot, in advance, sign away any of your civil rights, including your right to unrestricted freedom of movement. No way would this release stand up in court.
That is incorrect. You surrender unrestricted freedom of movement and absolute freedom of speech among other things when you join the military. That contract is most definitely enforceable.
I was referring to contracts between private parties. The military is, legally, a separate category entirely, and the terms of your enlistment are legally enforceable based on special statutory provisions, not alone on the ordinary common-law principles of contract law (though those remain relevant for some purposes). As for signing yourself into a psychiatric hospital, that is not a “contract” in the usual sense and, again, its legal force is based on special statutory provisions.
No way can the Church of Scientology bring this kind of contract into court and expect it to stick. It might try to make a case for an “introspection rundown” facility as being a species of psychiatric hospital, but that would get laughed out of court even if the CoS didn’t denounce psychiatry as a harmful pseudoscience in its own literature.