Abstract
One of the most controversial jury verdicts in recent history was delivered on June 21, 1982, for the trial of John Hinckley, Jr. On the gray, drizzly day of March 30, 1981, as President Ronald Reagan was leaving the Washington Hilton Hotel after giving a speech, Hinckley managed to shoot and wound the President, White House Press Secretary James Brady, District of Columbia police officer Thomas K. Delahanty, and U.S. Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy. A camera operator covering Reagan’s departure from the Hilton captured Hinckley’s shooting spree on videotape. The graphic footage was played again and again on television broadcasts nationwide.
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Notes
Our account of the Hinckley trial is based on several sources, including: Kiernan, L. A. (1982, June 22). Hinckley not guilty, legally insane. The Washington Post, pp. A1, A12. Taylor, S., Jr. (1982, June 22). Jury finds Hinckley not guilty, accepting his defense of insanity. The New York Times, pp. 1, D27. ABC News (1982a, June 21). Hinckley—Insane. Nightline. The insanity plea on trial. (1982, May 24). Newsweek, pp. 56–61. Judge Parker’s account of the announcement of the verdict was given in: Margasak, L. (1982, September 9). Judge kept eye on Hinckley in fear of outburst at trial. The News-Journal Papers, p. A10.
ABC News. (1982b, June 22). Insanity plea on trial. Nightline.
Hans, V. P., and Slater, D. (1983). John Hinckley, Jr. and the insanity defense: The public’s verdict. Public Opinion Quarterly, 47, 202–212.
The New York Times. (1982, September 12). Letters to Hinckley judge criticize acquittal. The New York Times, p. 37.
Newsletter of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. (1982). How others see us. Newsletter of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 7, 24–27.
Gerand, J. B. (1983). The insane Hinckley verdict. Policy Review, 23, 79–88.
Philadelphia Inquirer. (1982, September 13). Smith asks revision on proof rules. Philadelphia Inquirer, p. 5A. Also: Putzel, M. (1982, September 13). Reagan: Tighten insanity, other legal loopholes. Wilmington News Journal, p. A3.
Caplan, L. (1984, July 2). Annals of law: The insanity defense. The New Yorker, pp. 45–46, 48–52, 54–78.
United States Congress. (1982). Limiting the insanity defense. Hearing before the Subcommittee on Criminal Law of the Committee on the Judiciary. United States Senate, 97th Congress, 2nd Session. (Testimony by the Hinckley jurors: June 24, pp. 155–201.)
Quoted by Brenner, B. (1982, September). The insanity defense: Guilty by reason of Hinckley? The Cresset, p. 7.
United States Congress, pp. 166–167. 12Ibid., p. 166.
Quoted in Social Action and the Law. (1982). Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 38.
United States Congress, p. 164.
Ibid., p. 168.
Ibid., p. 165.
Ibid., p. 200.
Taylor, S., Jr. (1982, June 25). The New York Times. Reprinted in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, June 25, 1982, p. A3.
See, e.g., Morris, N. (1982). Madness and the Criminal Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kaufman, I. K. (1982, August 8). The insanity plea on trial. The New York Times Magazine, pp. 16–20.
Pasewark, R. A. (1981). Insanity plea: A review of the research literature. The Journal of Psychiatry and Law, 9, 357–401. Hans, V. P. (1984). The insanity plea: Public opinion and public policy. Paper presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Toronto.
Hans, V. P. (1985). An analysis of public attitudes toward the insanity defense. Unpublished manuscript.
Cited in Quen, J. M. (1978). A history of the Anglo-American legal psychiatry of violence and responsibility. In R. L. Sadoff (Ed.) Violence and Responsibility: The Individual, the Family, and Society. New York: S P Medical and Scientific Books (Spectrum).
Cited in Quen (1978), p. 21.
Considerable debate has occurred over the spelling of McNaughtan’s name. Over ten different versions have been used. We are convinced by the evidence reported by Richard Moran in his book, Knowing Right from Wrong: The Insanity Defense of Daniel McNaughtan (New York: Free Press, 1981), that “McNaughtan” is the correct spelling and we have adopted it here.
Moran (1981).
Quoted in Moran (1981).
Quoted in Moran (1981), p. 21. In 1840, eighteen-year-old Edward Oxford attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria. He was subsequently found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Rosenberg, C. E. (1968). The Trial of Assassin Guiteau. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bartol, C. R. (1983). Psychology and American Law. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth.
Freedman, L. Z. (Ed.) (1983). By Reason of Insanity. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, Inc. Quote is from p. 85.
Beram, N. J., and Tooney, B. G. (1979). The mentally disordered offender: A historical perspective. In N. J. Beram and B. G. Tooney (Eds.) Mentally III Offenders and the Criminal Justice System. New York: Praeger.
See Bartol (1983) for his discussion of how the broad scope of the Durham Rule was its downfall.
Simon, R. J. (1967). Juries and the Defense of Insanity. Boston: Little, Brown. See also: Simon, R. J. (1980). The Jury: Its Role in American Society. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books. Kalven and Zeisel also looked at the jury’s reaction to the insanity defense in The American Jury. However, they noted that on this topic the jury seemed curiously disengaged. They could not detect any regular pattern in the jury’s reaction to insanity cases. Perhaps this was due to the fact that there were very few cases in their sample (about 2%) where the defendant pleaded insanity. See discussion in: Kalven, H., and Zeisel, H. (1966). The American Jury. Boston: Little, Brown, Chapter 25.
The different patterns in the incest and housebreaking cases could have been due to several factors. For instance, the psychiatric testimony was very different in the two cases. In the incest case, the psychiatrist concluded that the father’s incestuous behavior was a product of his mental illness, but that he could still tell right from wrong. Thus, it makes sense that juries in the incest case were more likely to find the father not guilty by reason of insanity with the Durham Rule than the McNaughtan Rule. The former required only that the criminal behavior be a product of mental illness, while the latter required that the defendant be unable to tell right from wrong. In the housebreaking case, the psychiatrist did not state whether the defendant could tell right from wrong. Instead, he said that it had no bearing on the case, and the defendant’s criminal behavior was clearly a product of his mental illness. Perhaps the equivocal testimony of the psychiatrist about the right versus wrong issue was the reason that juries found the housebreaking defendant not guilty by reason of insanity at the same rate for both legal instructions. Also, just ten groups per condition were run in the housebreaking case; with a larger number of juries, perhaps differences would have emerged.
Finkel, N. J. (1982). Insanity defenses: Jurors’ assessments of mental disease, responsibility, and culpability. Paper presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C. Students evaluating the paranoid schizophrenic were more likely to find the defendant guilty in the DOM condition than in all other instructional conditions. The DOM doctrine was suggested by H. Finagrette, in a book entitled The Meaning of Criminal Insanity, published in 1972 by the University of California Press. The DOM doctrine focuses on culpability for allowing one’s mental condition to deteriorate prior to the act in question rather than focusing on criminal responsibility at the moment of the act, as is the case for all other legal definitions of insanity. Other than this single difference in evaluating the paranoid schizophrenic with a DOM test, there were no differences as a function of legal instructions.
Hans, V. P., and Slater, D. (1984). “Plain crazy”: Lay definitions of legal insanity. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 7, 105–114.
Ellsworth, P. C, Bukaty, R. M., Cowan, C. L., and Thompson, W. C. (1984). The death-qualified jury and the defense of insanity. Law and Human Behavior, 8, 81–93.
Simon (1967), p. 164.
Ibid., p. 165.
Simon, R. J., and Shackelford, W. (1965). The defense of insanity: A survey of legal and psychiatric opinion. Public Opinion Quarterly, 29, 411–424.
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© 1986 Valerie P. Hans and Neil Vidmar
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Hans, V.P., Vidmar, N. (1986). Mad or Bad? Juries and the Defense of Insanity. In: Judging the Jury. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6463-2_12
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