The case of Garry David (otherwise know as Garry Webb) has been a focus for some of the most intractable issues of law, ethics and medicine. The decision of the Supreme Court (Australia) allowing the Attorney-General of Victoria's application for an order for David's continued detention under the Community Protection Act 1990 (Vic) has by no means reduced the controversy surrounding the case. David himself remains an enigma, at once both frightening and pathetic, a living challenge to generally held beliefs as to the proper functioning of the legal system and the scope of the profession of psychiatry.
tl;dr a law was passed to keep one guy in prison forever.
At age 37 Garry David has spent almost all of his life since early adolescence in institutions. As a child his background was one of brutality and deprivation. He has mutilated his body more than 70 times, has threatened to kill public figures, cause a police bloodbath and commit a massacre that would make Melbourne's mass murders in Queen and Hoddle Street 'look like a picnic'. He was sentenced to 14 years jail after a 1980 gun battle. Newly released from prison at the time, he had shot a woman in a pizza shop leaving her a quadraplegic, and shot two policemen who came to her rescue. In prison he has assaulted more than 15 inmates and guards, but his main victim has been himself. He has sliced off his nipples, drunk acid, mutilated his penis, poked pins in his eyes, nailed his feet to the floor and swallowed razor blades. He has been diagnosed as suffering from borderline personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder or, to use an expression now less in vogue, as being a psychopath.
A Bureau of Criminal Intelligence Report prepared in September 1989 lists thirty-eight assaults by David on prison officers, police and prisoners between 1972 and 1989. The incidents included shooting, stabbing, threatening an officer with a metal hook and standing over other prisoners. According to the Report, David mutilated himself seventy seven times between 1978 and 1989.
His stated ambitions included being the first in Australia to kill a Prime Minister or Premier, and to be Australia's worst mass murderer: "I want to butcher, torture and kill hundreds and if possible thousands."
In a letter to Prisoners' Action Group spokesman, Mr Jeff Lapidos he said: "Russell St., Hoddle St., Walsh St., all of these will be chicken shit to what is soon to come, but my targets will be more selective, more or less."
David committed suicide by ingesting razor blades that led to peritonitis; he died on 11 June 1993.
At the time of his death aged 38, David was still a prisoner and had spent a total of 33 years in various institutions.
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MelbULawRw/1990/7.pdf
tl;dr a law was passed to keep one guy in prison forever.
At age 37 Garry David has spent almost all of his life since early adolescence in institutions. As a child his background was one of brutality and deprivation. He has mutilated his body more than 70 times, has threatened to kill public figures, cause a police bloodbath and commit a massacre that would make Melbourne's mass murders in Queen and Hoddle Street 'look like a picnic'. He was sentenced to 14 years jail after a 1980 gun battle. Newly released from prison at the time, he had shot a woman in a pizza shop leaving her a quadraplegic, and shot two policemen who came to her rescue. In prison he has assaulted more than 15 inmates and guards, but his main victim has been himself. He has sliced off his nipples, drunk acid, mutilated his penis, poked pins in his eyes, nailed his feet to the floor and swallowed razor blades. He has been diagnosed as suffering from borderline personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder or, to use an expression now less in vogue, as being a psychopath.
A Bureau of Criminal Intelligence Report prepared in September 1989 lists thirty-eight assaults by David on prison officers, police and prisoners between 1972 and 1989. The incidents included shooting, stabbing, threatening an officer with a metal hook and standing over other prisoners. According to the Report, David mutilated himself seventy seven times between 1978 and 1989.
His stated ambitions included being the first in Australia to kill a Prime Minister or Premier, and to be Australia's worst mass murderer: "I want to butcher, torture and kill hundreds and if possible thousands."
In a letter to Prisoners' Action Group spokesman, Mr Jeff Lapidos he said: "Russell St., Hoddle St., Walsh St., all of these will be chicken shit to what is soon to come, but my targets will be more selective, more or less."
David committed suicide by ingesting razor blades that led to peritonitis; he died on 11 June 1993.
At the time of his death aged 38, David was still a prisoner and had spent a total of 33 years in various institutions.
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MelbULawRw/1990/7.pdf
