The John Hinckley Trial

Szasz’s critique was soon put to the test in the John Hinckley trial. Hinckley showed no hints of a political purpose. John Wilkes Booth, Leon Czolgosz, and Sirhan Sirhan may have been moved by extremist politics in their shootings of presidents Lincoln and McKinley and of Robert Kennedy, and McNaughtan may have had a cause to advance, but that cannot be said of Hinckley.

Judge Barrington Parker told the jury in the Hinckley case that in addition to proving beyond a reasonable doubt Hinckley’s guilt on the thirteen counts of the indictment, the prosecution also had the burden of proving his criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt. Earlier, in his chambers, Judge Parker had read the draft of his instruction, which referred to “the burden placed upon the government, namely, that it must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Defendant was sane.” Roger Adelman, the assistant U.S. attorney, objected, saying, “Your Honor, we don’t have to prove he was sane. We have to prove he was criminally responsible.”⁶⁴ All parties agreed.

The jury subsequently heard the standard federal court definition of insanity from Judge Parker: “At the time of the criminal conduct the defendant, as a result of mental disease or defect, either lacked substantial capacity to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law or lacked substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct.” He told them that everyone is presumed to be sane and responsible for his or her acts, “but that presumption no longer controls when evidence is introduced that he may have a mental disease or defect.” Insanity does not require, moreover, a showing that the defendant was disoriented.

An indication of the task the jury faced is provided by the testimony of Dr.

“Son of a Gun Collector,” a short story by Hinckley, portrays a conflict between a boy and his father in which the mother is sympathetic to the boy. When the boy shoots the father with the father’s own weapon, he proclaims, “Now I’m the man of the house.” Goldman discussed the story with Hinckley, who did not feel the story was about himself and became angry when the connection was made. Nevertheless, Goldman thought that Hinckley did identify with the boy but did not recognize the Oedipal theme in his own wishes.⁶⁹

During cross-examination Goldman agreed that in his fantasy Hinckley had created an “all-evil prohibitive figure” who hated him, sought to destroy him, and denied him access to an idealized mother figure. The president became the prohibitive figure, and Jodie Foster assumed the mother role. Although Goldman admitted there was no direct evidence that Hinckley saw the president in that role, “I think there is evidence that he generally perceived people in power as keeping him away from the things that he wanted and keeps him from feeling like a whole person, a competent person, a person who could have what he wanted.” Goldman agreed that this meant that he shot President Reagan because Reagan was denying him access to Jodie Foster: “He felt in some ways that that was so at the moment, at the time that he decided that he had to do it, yes…he was operating partly under that fantasy.” Reagan represented, Goldman observed, “a type of figure which is the most important authority, the most powerful male available and someone, the elimination of whom would be sure to be impressive to Miss Foster.”⁷⁰

For the prosecution, on the other hand, psychiatrist Park E.

As to why Hinckley decided to shoot Reagan, the prosecution psychiatrists held the view that his choice demonstrated, not mental illness, but a desire for attention and fame. Sally A. C. Johnson told the jury that Hinckley showed a “logical reasoning process” when he picked his assassination target. He had stalked President Carter, but since Carter’s popularity in the polls declined, he shifted to president-elect Reagan. Four or five times after the election Hinckley waited outside Blair House with a gun when Reagan was staying there. He based his decision on how powerful the person was. But even on those occasions he chose not to shoot. He was not driven by suicidal impulses and the distorted emotions from his inner world which compelled him to shoot at Reagan. Johnson concluded that Hinckley was not “a person compelled to shoot the President…that wasn’t the case with John.” “He functioned too well,” Johnson testified, to fit the pattern of schizophrenia.⁷²

In the Hinckley trial the judge and jury faced the problem Lord Patrick Devlin saw as the dialectic of trial by jury: “Hard cases make bad law; the jury is sometimes too frightened of the hard case and the judge of the bad law.

Three problems arise with the insanity plea. The first is that we expect that it should be reduced to a formula. How many books on psychology and law, especially criminal justice textbooks, treat the insanity test as if it were litmus paper? The fact that there are several versions of the test, so goes the implication, merely means that in criminal justice, unlike chemistry, we have yet to find a reliable dye. If law is a set of rules and formulae to which the judge and jury have the task of fitting each case, law can be clear-cut, the fog of discretion can be dispelled. Instead, because law develops from stories, not a periodic chart of the elements, we should look for lessons which converge to teach us, not formulae. When the law lords stated the McNaughtan rule in answer to questions about “the criminal responsibility of persons laboring under partial delusions,” they spoke out of a tradition of law, not from the position of a committee writing rules for a new board game. If we think of the insanity standard as a formula, we might make the mistake of applying it in an all-or-nothing fashion, like the rules of baseball or Monopoly. But if it is understood as a consequence of a principle, a test in which the plumb line of experience is held up to the case at hand, the insanity test might not seem so confusing and contradictory.⁷⁴ What matters is our expectation of the law.

The second problem with the insanity defense is that the jury is exasperated by the conflicting testimony of experts. Much of the testimony of psychiatrists is a richness that the members of the jury do not need. The jury’s verdict is not about the nature of the defendant’s illness. Neither the symptoms, the causes, nor treatment concern them.

The variety of mental states of which the human mind is capable resembles the shadings in the color spectrum. No compartments or divisions break the continuum from just this side of infrared to just this side of ultraviolet. So it is with the mind. When we look at a rainbow, however, we begin to pick out the separate colors. We cluster red, yellow, and blue, the primary colors, and sort out various combinations with orange, green, pink, or purple. People with a sophisticated eye for color will note aqua, peach, or chartreuse. In the same way, psychiatrists will see conditions of mental illness clustering around schizophrenia, manic-depression, paranoia, phobia, and other conditions, including milder categories of mental disorientation. A diagnosis may account for the mind’s many blends, but a jury’s judgment must be either/or. When experts testify about a defendant’s mental state, we then ask the jury to reproduce, with their verdict, the rainbow in black and white.

Even if we revise the insanity plea to allow for, on the one side of the spectrum, a plea of diminished responsibility, or, on the other side, a guilty-but-insane verdict, or even if we abolish the special plea completely and return to the mens rea (criminal intent) standard, we have not essentially changed the jury’s difficulty.⁷⁵ The former, a more tolerant test, allows the jury to reduce first-degree murder to manslaughter, as it did in the Dan White trial, by saying that the accused is sane but not fully responsible. Its reciprocal, the second and more restrictive test, permits the jury to say the accused is guilty but not fully sane. Returning the law to what it was before the Hadfield and McNaughtan tests, making mental illness no more an exculpatory claim than blindness, would abolish the insanity defense,⁷⁶ but it would not provide juries and judges with an automatic touchstone. All three reforms adjust the concept of a guilty mind (mens rea) to fit the circumstances, slackening up on it in the first, tightening it in the second, and pruning all except criminal intent in the third. The fundamental question remains that of responsibility, no matter how and in which direction we refine it.

The third complicating feature of the insanity defense is the ubiquity of a political agenda. Of the sixteen most important American assassination cases, most raise the question of insanity.⁷⁷ Of the most important insanity plea cases, most involve leading political figures: King George III (Hadfield), Prime Minister Peel (McNaughtan), presidents Garfield and Reagan (Guiteau and Hinckley), and we might also include Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk (Supervisor White). The persons involved make these cases important, and the insanity issue makes them hard. “Great cases like hard cases make bad law,” wrote Justice Holmes. “For great cases are called great not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment. These immediate interests exercise a kind of hydraulic pressure which makes what previously was clear seem doubtful and before which even well-settled principles of law will bend.”⁷⁸

Although Justice Holmes wrote these remarks in a famous railroad case, we might say the same about the insanity defense in trials with a political agenda. That agenda, unlike its purely legal counterpart, will provide the “immediate overwhelming interest” to which Holmes refers. Yet, what is society to do when the hydraulic pressure of public opinion and events surrounding an assassination forces these hard cases into court? They must be resolved. If the results are perplexing, this reflects Justice Holmes’s other reminder that “the life of the law has not been logic: It has been experience.” As Holmes elucidates, the law develops out of “the felt necessities of the time” and other factors, “avowed or unconscious,” which embody “the story of a nation’s development through many centuries,” not the “axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.”⁷⁹ Political trials in general, and those involving the question of insanity in particular, provide a prime example of the law having its birth and life in experience.