@BeeGirl, thank you for the very informative article on a complicated topic!
It’s Crazy
Quote from article:
The insanity defense exists because the intention to commit an illegal act is a fundamental element of criminal conduct. English law has recognized for more than four hundred years that children and “lunatics” lack the mental capacity to form a criminal intent. The question has always been how to limit the defense so that every criminal can’t claim to have acted under the spell of a delusion and go free. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a test was in place that in some form prevails today: A defendant was insane if he did not know the nature and quality of his act or if he did know it, he did not know it was wrong. Around fifty years ago, there was a swing away from the right-wrong test toward a mental illness standard: If a criminal act was the result of a mental disease or defect (even an irresistible impulse), the defendant was not guilty by reason of insanity.
This proved to be the loophole that everyone had been afraid of. When John Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity for attempting to assassinate Ronald Reagan, the mental illness test went out the window and federal law and many states returned to a right-wrong standard. Texas has one of the nation’s highest bars for a successful insanity defense. Andrea Yates’s lawyers had to show both that she suffered from a mental illness or defect (no problem there) and that she did not know that her conduct was wrong. But she did know. Toward the end of her confession, Sergeant Mehl asked her, “Okay, you had told me earlier that, that you’d been having these thoughts about hurting your children for up to two years. Is that, is that about right?”
“Yes,” Yates said.
“Okay, is there anything that happened two years ago that, that made you, that you believe led you to have these thoughts?”
“I realized that it was time to be punished.”
“And what do you need to be punished for?”
“For not being a good mother.”
“How did you see drowning your five children as a way to be punished? Did you want the criminal justice system to punish you, or did you—”
“Yes.” There it was: For prosecutors, this was a clear admission by Andrea Yates that she knew it was wrong to kill. The square peg of justice had just been hammered into the round hole of mental illness.
The insanity defense had little chance of prevailing in Yates’s trial. “The State could say its whole case in one sentence: ‘She knew it was wrong,'” says Wendell Odom, a Houston attorney who helped defend Yates. “Our side of the case was much more complicated. We had to explain: ‘If you know something is wrong but you’re delusional, that’s not the same thing as being sane.'” Statistically, an insanity plea is a losing proposition, which is one reason it is used in less than 1 percent of criminal cases. The success rate is around 25 percent, but this is misleading. Most successful pleas involve lesser crimes, and the state doesn’t contest the insanity defense in those cases. “If Andrea Yates had stolen a loaf of bread, she’d be in Vernon [site of a state hospital for the criminally insane] right now,” Odom says. But, of course, she didn’t steal a loaf of bread; she killed five people.
The problem isn’t that the case was in the criminal justice system; it’s the way the justice system works. Here’s what should be done to fix it:
Change the law so that the right-wrong test is not the ultimate determinant of sanity in all cases.
“It’s a bizarre standard,” says Dr. Lucy Puryear, a Houston psychiatrist who specializes in postpartum depression and testified for the defense in the Yates case. “To define insanity so narrowly—did she know her conduct was wrong—overlooks the larger issue of, What do you mean by ‘knowing’? While she was drowning the children, she thought what she was doing was right, even though she might have known it was illegal. I don’t blame the jury or even the prosecutors. They were looking at her conduct through the wrong lens.” The exact wording of a revised test for sanity is something for experts in criminal law to determine, but this ought to be the starting point: Severe, documented mental illness that loosens one’s grasp on reality ought to trump “knowledge” of right and wrong.
Tell juries what happens to defendants after a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.
One reason insanity pleas usually lose is that jurors worry that a defendant might get sent to a state mental facility, win the sympathies of her doctors, prove to their satisfaction that she is cured, and be discharged to commit more crimes. Rather than take the risk, a jury will take the safer course of sending someone like Andrea Yates to prison. State law prohibits telling jurors what really happens if a patient who has committed a violent felony is recommended for release from the mental hospital: The trial judge has the ultimate say about the case for as long as the sentence would have lasted if the jury had found the defendant guilty (life in the case of Andrea Yates), and the judge can send the perpetrator back to the mental hospital. If the jury had known that Andrea Yates could have spent the rest of her life in a state mental hospital, they might have been more inclined to find her not guilty by reason of insanity.
Allow juries to reach a verdict of insane but guilty.
This alternative would permit juries to hand down a sentence requiring confinement for a fixed period, but at least the defendant would be in a mental hospital instead of a prison.
