The U. S. Supreme Court is set to rule on the constitutionality of insanity-defense laws across the nation. The case, Clark v. Arizona, has to do with a defendant, Eric Michael Clark, who at age seventeen killed an Arizona police officer, supposedly thinking that he was shooting a space alien.
Clark's attorneys argue that they should have been allowed to enter into evidence proof that Clark had been insane at the time of the murder. Their argument for a constitutional right to an insanity defense will put the Court on the record on one of the law's most controversial issues.
Writing in USA Today, Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University argues that a society which fails to "recognize the difference between a premeditated and delusional act," is immoral. Turley points to four states, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, and Utah, that have eliminated the insanity defense altogether. Other states have moved to curtail the insanity defense in significant ways.
In recent years, there has been no shortage of notorious defendants claiming an insanity defense. Currently, Lashaun Harris is on trial in San Francisco for the murder of her three children, whom she is charged with throwing into San Francisco Bay last October. According to press reports, Harris told authorities that God wanted her children as a sacrifice.
The nation's conscience was seared by the news that Andrea Yates, a housewife in Houston, had drowned her five children. With regard to all these cases, the public at large is generally ready to concede that those who committed these acts might be mentally impaired or ill, but most Americans believe that mental illness does not eliminate the moral burden of a criminal act.
The idea of the insanity defense has roots that go all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome. Nevertheless, the modern version of an insanity defense emerged form the attempted assassination of the British Prime Minister in 1843. In that case, Daniel M'Naghten shot Edward Drummond, an aide to British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. M'Naghten's goal was the assassination of the Prime Minister. Instead, he shot and killed Sir Robert's principal secretary.
Faced with a defendant that appeared to be insane, British courts came up with the so-called "M'Naghten Rules," intended to identify which defendants are insane, and thus are not to be held as criminally responsible for their actions.
In one form or another, the M'Naghten Rules have found their way into American jurisprudence. Most American jurisdictions allow some form of an insanity defense.
As the rule stipulates, an accused is excused from criminal punishment if "at the time of committing the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defective reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong." As Professor Phillip E. Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley, explains, "Successful defendants under M'Naghten are also generally so incapable of living in normal circumstances that there is no question of granting them freedom." But that assessment is now clouded by the fact that so many mental patients are now released into the general population. There is very little assurance that an accused found to be not guilty by reason of insanity will be kept from the larger society for any lengthy period of time.
In essence, the M'Naghten Rule opened the door for insanity claims in criminal prosecutions--especially for violent and heinous acts such as homicide. Nevertheless, the legal elite has pushed the definition far beyond the M'Naghten Rule. The "Model Penal Code of the American Law Institute [ALI]," asserts that "a person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law." That last phrase represents a radical expansion of the M'Naghten Rule.
