MANASSAS, Va. -- Opposing experts testifying in Lorena Bobbitt's malicious wounding trial agreed Tuesday that she cut off her husband's penis in hopes of ending years of abuse.
They disagreed on whether she was legally justified.
"She attacked the weapon, the instrument of her torture, which was her husband's penis," said psychiatrist Susan Feister, a defense witness.
She said Bobbitt, 24, was "at an impasse, a situation that made her crazy. She had a breakdown" and acted out of an "irresistible impulse" - a legal defense in Virginia.
Prosecution witness Miller Ryan, a state psychiatrist, had a different view.
He told jurors "there was no evidence she (Bobbitt) was out of touch with reality" when she lifted the sheet over her sleeping husband, looked "at his whole body," and lashed out at what was hurting her.
The rape that Lorena Bobbitt says took place just before she cut her husband was "the last straw," said Ryan. "She chose to amputate his penis. In my opinion, you don't have an irresistible impulse, but an impulse she did not resist."
The defense rested its case Tuesday after four days of testimony from experts, friends and John and Lorena Bobbitt. The most compelling tales involve their troubled marriage.
Feister told jurors that John Bobbitt, 26, made his wife feel "worthless, degraded, like she had no value," with rapes and threats of forced anal sex.
She said John Bobbitt came home once after having sex with his mistress and told his wife he wanted to "conduct an experiment. He wanted to have sex with her for comparison to see which he liked better."
Feister said when John Bobbitt came home last June and allegedly raped his wife, Lorena "felt trapped, that there were no alternatives. She felt like she was in a box." He was acquitted of the marital sexual assault charge in November.
She said Lorena Bobbitt suffered a culmination of three severe mental problems - major depressive disorder, panic disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
She "was flooded by this wave of emotion," said Feister.
Lorena Bobbitt told the jury last week that she didn't remember slicing off her husband's penis, which was reattached. She did remember hurling the organ into a field as she drove away from their apartment, and throwing away the bloody, 12-inch knife.
Bobbitt faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
The jury of five men and seven women will likely begin deliberations today after the prosecution calls more rebuttal witnesses and lawyers make their closing arguments.
