So today we're going to begin the third installment of hot topics in criminal justice. What we're going to focus on is what it means to be criminally responsible. Responsible for one's criminal actions. If you remember, we ended the last lecture with a discussion about mental illness and under what circumstances mental illness might undermine a person's autonomy. We're going to continue that discussion today by talking about the insanity defense. Which is the principle where the criminal law defines who was responsible for crime. But we're also going to talk about a special subset of cases where responsibility might be an issue. Those are cases where the criminal defendant argues and says the brain made him do it. Or that, something about us neurology or biology caused the crime and therefore he should be excused. So the first clip you saw, was I think a very useful clip because it showed you four different patients who have serious mental illness. All of them had what psychiatrists would call schizophrenia. Popular to common wisdom, schizophrenia is not split personality, it's not multiple personality. Schizophrenia is a mental illness, the symptoms of which are usually hallucinations and delusions, paired or disorganized thinking, flitting from one topic to another without much coherence, repetitive behavior. We saw examples of all of that in the first video. These unfortunate people are really out of touch with reality in a very significant way. If any of these people commit a crime, they are very likely to be found insane or at least have a plausible argument of insanity. Now the second video was about Andrea Yates, it's probably the most famous case of the insanity defense we've had in the last 20 years. As you know from the video, she killed all five of her children, she drowned them at a bathtub. In this particular case, she argued that because of schizophrenia, she was insane and she won that argument at least the second time around and she was sent to a mental hospital. Which is where most people who are found insane are sent. What we're going to talk about in part is why we have an insane defense; why do people like Andrea Yates have an excuse to their crime? Why do we say they're not guilty by reason of insanity? I think many people are confused by this. She obviously killed her five children. How can we say she's not guilty? It has to do with the purposes of punishment and particularly the retributive purpose of punishment that we talked about in the last lecture. The idea is that criminal law only punishes people who blameworthy, who deserve to be punished and the insane defense tries to identify people who are not blameworthy or in fact, blameless. So even though Andrea Yates committed a horrific crime, she wasn't found guilty. She was found not guilty because we can't assign blame to her. She just did not know what she was doing. At least that is what jury found out she couldn't be blamed for her crime. So the question then becomes what is insanity? Right, that's the $64 million question. In American criminal law, that the insane defense defined very narrowly. Very few people succeed at the insanity defense and I want to demonstrate that by telling you about a lot of famous cases. The first two of which did result and found not guilty by reason of insanity but the rest of which did not. So we have Andrea Yates first, she was found insane at least the second time around. Her lawyers argued that because of her delusions she came to believe that she was possessed by the devil or at least the devil was telling it to kill her children and that her children might be possessed by the devil as well unless she killed them. In other words, the argument was if she killed them, her kids would go to heaven. If she didn't kill them they'd go to hell. So that was her argument and a jury ended up being convinced by that. Ended up finding her not guilty by reason insanity. We'll talk more about her case in second, right now I'm just going to be briefly describing a number of cases. The second case where a person was found not guilty by reason of insanity, I want to talk about is a very famous one and this is John Hinckley. You all know that he tried to assassinate President Reagan. He came to believe that Jodie Foster would fall in love with him if he killed the president of United States. So the defense argued in his case that because of his mental illness, and he did have a mental illness, he had perhaps not a mental as serious as in Andrea Yates but nonetheless a serious mental illness, because of his mental illness he came to believe something that just couldn't be true. It was delusional that if he killed the President, the actress Jodie Foster would find him attractive. They also argued that he was compelled to commit this crime. So they made both of those arguments and he was found insane. But the Yates case and the Hinckley case are pretty rare. We don't see many cases like that. So here's a third case. You may know this case, Jeffrey Dahmer. He asserted insane defense and I think defense team thought they might have a good argument, why? Because his case is very bizarre. He would kill people, then cut them up into little pieces, keep on a refrigerator and snack on the body parts. Obviously extremely bizarre behavior. He asserted insane defense of Wisconsin but he lost. His insane defense was rejected. There's another case, James Holmes, you may remember this, it's fairly recent. This is an individual who went to a movie theater in Colorado, he killed 12 people and badly hurt 70 or at least hurt 70 other people. As you can see from the slide, people to time describes behavior bizarre, freaky, incoherent rambling. So he argued as a result of mental illness, that he should not be found guilty. The court and the jury did not buy his insanity defense, he was convicted. Another case Charles Manson. Charlie Manson made famous by the Beatles song, Helter Skelter. There also in movies about this case. He convinced his followers that African-Americans were about to take over the country and so he wanted to try to prevent that. But his plan to do so was relatively strange. He got his followers to attack white people Sharon Tate and her acquaintances all of whom were white and then try to set it up to make it look like blacks did it, in the hopes a race war would be ignited and thus there would be an opportunity to make sure that the blacks didn't take over the country. He clearly was suffering from schizophrenia, had a serious mental illness, but he refused insanity defense. He did not want to assert insanity defense. So despite what many people think about the Charlie Manson case, insanity was actually never raised. Here's another case. The Unabomber case, the case of Theodore Kaczynski. Theodore Kaczynski mailed letter bombs to a number of different people in the country all of whom were involved in technology, all of them were somehow involved in developing technological innovations and unfortunately, three of those people were killed by his letter bombs and number of other people were badly hurt. Even the prosecution witnesses thought that Kaczynski has schizophrenia. There's no doubt about it, he had a serious mental illness. But he refused, also just like Charlie Manson, he refused to assert an insanity defense. He did not want to be labeled mentally ill. In fact, in his famous manifesto he said, "I would rather die than be called mentally ill." It's another case where many people think, "Oh the insane defense was an issue. " but in fact, it was not and he ended up pleading guilty to three counts of capital murder. So he's in prison right now, he's not fit, I get the very reason of insanity. Last case is Jared Loughner. This was the individual who killed a federal judge and badly harmed Gabrielle Giffords, United States Representative, who is still suffering the consequences. In the weeks before the killing, he became incredibly bizarre and after the killing, it was clear he was blatantly mentally ill. They had to put him in a padded cell. He obviously had severe mental problems but he and his lawyers decided they couldn't win an insanity defense at least in the state of Arizona, which has a very narrow insanity formulation, and they ended up pleading guilty. So he also is serving time. So only the first two cases the Yates and Hinckley cases was there a find of not guilt by reason insanity. Even though all these other people had serious mental illness, they ended up being found guilty. Either because the jury rejected the verdict or because they didn't want to raise the defense or they did not want to be called mentally ill. In fact, that's what we find across the country. As you can see here four states have gotten rid of the insane defense. So can't even raise the kinds of arguments we've been talking about and the insanity defense is raised in a very small portion cases, less than a half percent of all felony cases. It does succeed occasionally but usually when it succeeds, it's because the prosecutor says, "Yes I agree this person is seriously mentally ill" and to tell you the truth. I think the agenda of the prosecutor, "Let's get this person in a mental hospital and keep them there for a very long time." I think that's what's going on in these cases. When instead an insanity claim gets in front of a jury it rarely wins. It wins about 25 percent of the time and here in the state of Tennessee in homicide cases when the insanity defenses raise in front of a jury, it has not prevailed in the last 30 years. So it's extremely hard to win an insanity defense. Juries are very skeptical. In fact, some might say juries are too skeptical. It doesn't help that the insanity defense is defined so narrowly. So when we come back, we're going to talk about the precise definitions of insanity. But first, any questions about what we just talked about? Okay. We'll take a break and when we come back, we'll talk about how the criminal law defines insanity defense.
