According to the New York Times, [Jared Loughner] may plead not guilty by reason of insanity. How do mental-health experts figure out whether a federal defendant should qualify for the insanity defense?
With difficulty. To prove insanity in court, defense attorneys must demonstrate that their client’s mental illness prevented him from understanding the wrongness of his criminal undertaking at the time of the offense. (This standard is stricter than merely showing the defendant generally cannot not tell right from wrong.) They must also show a clear connection between the defendant’s delusions and the crime he committed. So, for example, a paranoid schizophrenic shoplifter who burgles a melon because he’s hungry probably won’t get off the hook. But a similar shoplifter who steals the melon because he believes the melon will neutralize a chip the CIA planted in his brain probably will.
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In the end, evaluators can only state their opinions and how they arrived at their conclusions. Ultimately it’s up to a judge or jury to determine whether the insanity defense holds water.
John Doe: It’s more comfortable for you to label me as insane.
David Mills: It’s VERY comfortable.
– from the movie Se7ven
Hopefully, he’ll just kill himself in his cell or shanked by another prisoner and we can save ourselves the cost of both a trial and incarceration.
Now they’re saying that Loughner was taking Salvia. And using the outrage to legislation to make its sale and possession illegal. Haven’t we learned from past experience with Pot, that this doesn’t work? It only ends up putting relatively harmless users, in prison with the killers and other hard cases. Burdens the police forces with another thing to stop, without any added funding to do it. A gives the drug traffickers a new product to exploit. So one nutjob went off and killed some people. And maybe, MAYBE, he smoked something, or ate something, that distorted his judgment. That’s no call for wide spread banning of anything he may have used. He used a gun, and they’re NOT talking about making those illegal.
This guy said enough that he left a record showing he knew he was about to do a bad thing. He also said enough that he doesn’t completely sort out his dream world from the real world. I think he is going to pass for sane in that he knew what he was doing was wrong and he would pay a price.