The Insanity Defense
posted
to www.marxmail.org on
Today's NY Times reports on a controversial death penalty
case in
In one of the more extraordinary cases in the nation's leading death penalty state, a murder defendant with a long history of mental illness who fired his lawyers and argued his own insanity defense in a cowboy outfit is scheduled to be executed on Thursday.
The condemned man, Scott Louis Panetti, 45, is to die by lethal injection unless the governor or the courts intervene.
In 1992, Mr. Panetti, who was then 34 and had been hospitalized 14 times for mental illness, smashed his way into the home of his estranged wife and, with her and their young daughter watching, shot her parents to death.
At his trial in 1995, Mr. Panetti dressed in a Tom Mix hat and cowboy garb, rambled incoherently and tried to subpoena Jesus Christ, John F. Kennedy and Anne Bancroft. He went into trances, nodded off, and gestured threateningly at jurors.
(clip)
The National Mental Health Association, based in Alexandria, Va., called Tuesday on the governor to commute Mr. Panetti's sentence to life imprisonment, saying Mr. Panetti "has schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and there is evidence to suggest that he was psychotic at the time of his crime." In addition, the group said his mental illness "hindered his ability to aid in his own defense."
At a news conference in
"Allowing a schizophrenic in a cowboy costume to represent himself in a death penalty case gives new meaning to the term `frontier justice,' "said Jim Marcus, executive director of the defender service. "Given the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' history of tolerance for defense lawyers who sleep or use drugs and alcohol throughout death penalty trials, however, its laissez-faire approach is hardly surprising," he said.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/national/04EXEC.html
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Years from now, when socialist historians of the future
examine the dead carcass of
For all practical purposes, the insanity defense is a thing
of the past. It was first introduced in
The M'Naghten Rule can be simply described as a "right and wrong" test. The jury was required to answer two questions: (1) did the defendant know what he was doing when he committed the crime?; or (2) did the defendant understand that his actions were wrong?
When psychotic individuals were on trial without a prior history of hospitalization, it was somewhat more difficult to find them not guilty by reason of insanity. Nowadays, the fact that Scott Louis Panetti was in mental hospitals 14 times previous to the murder of his in-laws had no effect on the trial. So what happened?
In a word, John Hinckley.
After
Within three years of
"It is an affirmative defense to a prosecution under any federal statute that, at the time of the commission of the acts constituting the offense, the defendant as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, was unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts. Mental disease or defect does not otherwise constitute a defense."
As a rule of thumb, schizophrenics who are in a "severe" condition are too detached from reality to go out and kill somebody, let alone cross the street. People who are this dysfunctional are generally hospitalized. The more typical occurrence is somebody who goes off their medication when they are not hospitalized, but who are sufficiently in touch with reality to use a knife or some other weapon. And even if such an individual is in a "severe" state at the time of the crime, they will pump him full of medications during the trial to effectuate a "sane" condition sufficient to win a conviction. Another factor that militates against a successful defense is that psychiatrists are no longer allowed as expert witnesses in many cases.