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By Root 1757 0

Ronald Reagan, as the president was leaving the hotel for his limousine. The president was seriously wounded, and his press secretary, James Brady, struck by one of the bullets, suffered severe brain damage. Hinckley was peculiar and unbalanced, to say the least; he had shot the president not, apparently, for any political reason, but to impress a young movie star, Jodie Foster, whom he had never met. At the trial in federal district court, his defense (of course) was insanity. This was the only real issue, and consequently, the whole affair became a battle between psychiatric witnesses. The trial lasted eight weeks; the jury deliberated for three and a half days, and then returned with a verdict: not guilty by reason of insanity.

It was a plausible outcome, but it, too, evoked a storm of protest. A news poll the very next day found that three-fourths of the public disapproved of the verdict; 70 percent wanted to get rid of the insanity plea. In a Delaware poll a week later, 80 percent of the sample considered the insanity defense a “loophole.” The president himself complained that the defense was “used more and more in murder trials.” These people are “found innocent by reason of insanity,” are put in a mental hospital, later to be “turned loose” as “cured”; then “they go right out in the street and commit the same crime over again.”75

All this was nonsense, of course, but Congress heard the thunder and saw the lightning very clearly. In 1984, Congress reconstituted the insanity defense for federal cases; the new rules harked back to the old McNaghten rules, with changes. A defendant can use the defense only if “at the time of the commission of the act” he or she, “as a result of a severe mental disease or defect,” is “unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of the act.”76 “Insanity” does not include psychopathic and sociopathic behavior. A few states have gone so far as to abolish, or try to abolish, the insanity defense altogether.77

This legislative activity, to be sure, is based on half-facts, non-facts, or on plain prejudice. But the underlying rage is also, in a way, understandable. We have discussed the 1959 New Mexico case of State v. Padilla (see above, this chapter).78 Here are the facts of the case, as set out rather drily by the Supreme Court of New Mexico. Padilla was a Mexican-American, twenty-five years old when the crime was committed. He had a second-grade education and worked “as an itinerant farm laborer all of his life.” His intelligence rating was “dull normal.”

On October 5, 1957, Padilla drank beer in a bar in Roswell, New Mexico, from noon until midnight and smoked at least two marijuana cigarettes. He left the bar with a half-case of beer, went to the home of the victim, a five-year-old child, and “took her into his car. He then drove approximately fourteen miles.... [Then] he raped the child and thereafter killed her by stabbing her with a screwdriver.” He took a seat cover from the car, put it over her body, and covered it with sand. Then he fled to Mexico. He was arrested and returned to New Mexico on October 12, 1957. He confessed soon afterwards. Padilla was, of course, convicted; his appeal turned on the question of diminished responsibility. As we have seen, he won the case.

There is a lot to be said for the court’s decision in the light of Padilla’s background and his mental profile. There is a lot to be said—that is, if you believe that a trial is for weighing and judging the fate of this particular person. But the crime itself was cruel, wanton, pointless. Padilla brutally snuffed out the life of a little child. He plunged her family into the darkest pool of grief. A crime so horrible evokes rage, not understanding; it is the kind of crime that gives the system its sorest, most difficult test. It does not always pass the test.

In the years after 1950, there seemed to be no end of senseless, vicious, wanton crimes; and the media played them for all they were worth. Public opinion froze solid. The wheel turned, and criminal justice became, relatively speaking,