Miscellaneous

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Sanity Clause

By Anne Skove, Esq.

We think we know crazy. Gnarls Barkley remembers when he lost his mind and asks, "Does that make me crazy?" Patsy Cline (and Willie Nelson) thought they were "crazy for feeling so lonely." Fine Young Cannibals blamed a woman: she drives me crazy.

But do we? Our legal system has its roots in the borderline ancient M'Naughten rule, but can't even agree on the proper spelling.

The NPR show Talk of the Nation, too, is struggling with sanity. Listen to Man Who Held Daughter Captive to Plead Insanity, Talk of the Nation (May 6, 2008).

Commentator Dahlia Lithwick seems to think that insanity pleas are limited to the Hinckleys, Dahmers, and Fritzls of the world; she needs to get out of DC more (or at least into some lower courts). (And OK, full disclosure, we admit to having Lithwick envy.) We've never seen good statistics on the frequency of insanity pleas; she cites numbers (less than 1%) but no source.

The public perception that someone could fake insanity and suddenly be running around loose is nicely debunked by Miss Dahlia.

Ouch! Neal Conan said defendants who successfully plea NGRI "get off."

Alan Dershowitz "believes in" the insanity defense. Again, he talks about extreme cases, citing a hypothetical Alzheimer's patient as a reason to preserve the defense in some form.

He noted the fine line between being competent to stand trial yet too insane to have committed the crime at the time. (This, he says, accounts for the low number of defendants using the defense; most insane people won't be competent to stand trial to begin with.) Dershowitz brings GBMI to the table, too: guilty but (or and) mentally ill. GBMI is an interesting fence-position between culpability and illness.

He makes the important point that pleading insanity will likely land a defendant in custody far longer than any prison term. One caller had a personal story about how this works (or doesn't) in Minnesota, where her schizophrenic brother (who was found unfit to stand trial) has been committed for at least a decade longer than he would have served time in prison, with little hope of being released by the 7-judge panel.

Professor Christopher Slobogin, who quite literally wrote the book on the insanity defense, advocated for a narrower application of the insanity defense.

Slobogin thinks the current test -- ability to appreciate the wrongfulness of the conduct, inability to control behavior -- is too broad. He would focus instead on the reasons for the conduct.

Callers ran the gamut, from a woman who didn't seem to grasp the concept of legal insanity, to a defense attorney from Virginia who felt the standard for competency to stand trial was far too high.

Full post as published by court-o-rama.org on May 07, 2008 (boomark / email).