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I am not sure if Richard Fidler read what I wrote here the other day, but I feel compelled to repeat it since he questions whether the insanity plea can still be used in American courts. It was originally sent to the list nearly 7 years ago. ---- Today's NY Times reports on a controversial death penalty case in Texas: NY Times, February 4, 2004 Insanity Issue Lingers as Texas Execution Is Set By RALPH BLUMENTHAL 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 Austin on Tuesday, representatives of the Texas Defender Service, a private nonprofit law firm representing indigent capital defendants, called on Mr. Perry for a 30-day reprieve to allow a review of the case. "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 === Years from now, when socialist historians examine the dead carcass of US capitalism, they will pay special attention to the growing barbarism of the penal system in the late 20th century. While most attention will obviously be focused on the reintroduction of the death penalty and a racist judicial system that incarcerates minorities disproportionately, there will also have to be a close look at the tendency to treat mentally ill people as common criminals. For all practical purposes, the insanity defense is a thing of the past. It was first introduced in Great Britain in the 1830s, a time of child labor and other cruelties that figure large in the novels of Charles Dickens. The insanity defense was first used in the case of an 1843 assassination attempt on British Prime Minister Robert Peel by a psychotic individual named Daniel M'Naghten. When a physician testified that M'Naghten was insane, the prosecution agreed to stop the case and the defendant was declared insane despite protests from Queen Victoria and the House of Lords. The M'Naghten Rule can be simply described as a "right and wrong" test. The jury must 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 Hinckley was found not guilty by insanity of his assassination attempt on the beloved reactionary US President, committees of the House and Senate held hearings regarding use of the insanity defense within a month of the verdict. Within three years of Hinckley's acquittal, Congress and half of the states enacted laws limiting use of the defense and one state, Utah, abolished the defense outright. In 1986 Utah was joined by Montana and Idaho, two other "frontier justice" states. Congress passed revisions in the defense embodied in the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, which reads: "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 criminal conviction. Another factor that militates against a successful defense is that psychiatrists are no longer allowed as expert witnesses in many cases. Hinckley himself has resurfaced recently in a new controversy. After 21 years of confinement in a mental hospital, he has been allowed to visit his aging parents on weekends under stringent conditions. This has outraged all the rightwing talking heads on AM hate radio and the Fox cable news. Meanwhile, all of the top officials of the Reagan administration who broke all sorts of laws in backing the murderous Nicaraguan contras did token time in country club prisons. I guess the lesson is if you are going out to kill people, you should do it on a wholesale basis while wrapped in the American flag. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
