Do you watch Law & Order? I do, and despite the fact that I actually did take several law courses in college and business school, I'll be honest: much of my law I learned from Dick Wolf's many franchises. So when I see the news today about Patricia Dunn I think, ripped from the headlines! and I wonder:

Will her attorney in her eventual trial claim that the cancer made her do it?

Dunn, the now-former, now-infamous chairwoman of Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) is rumored to be heading towards an indictment today (Update: Dunn chose to surrender at a Silicon Valley courthouse on October 5, and will be arraigned November 17) for her rather pathological behavior, which ran the gamut from lying to spying to generally shocking paranoia. "Separately," she's been recently told by her physician that her ovarian cancer (diagnosed in 2004) is "advanced," and she'll be starting chemotherapy later this week.

Dunn has been battling her health for the past two years, while in the throes of what seems like an evil and invasive disease. If you've known anyone who's dealt with such terrifically defeating illness, you might have seen any number of different responses, from "courage" to fear to downright falling apart. My mother-in-law, who died of cancer two years ago, became blind and deaf to any negative news for the past several months of her life, completely ignoring the bad behavior of those around her. Another distant family member who's dying of liver disease has decided to hoard all his belongings -- and those of his brother and sister -- jealously guarding things that mean nothing to him in an odd denial of his fate.

It's not a stretch to me, then, to decide that these two pieces of news -- an indictment for strange, paranoid, and yes, criminal behavior; an indication that a serious disease is becoming more so -- might not be "separate" after all. I wouldn't at all be surprised if, indeed, the cancer made her do it.