The first is Richard Chase, a.k.a. The Sacramento Vampire, a mentally disturbed individual who between December 1977 and January 1978 went on a month-long killing rampage in which he killed (in an unimaginably gruesom and cruel fashion) six people. He was sentenced to death on six counts of first-degree murder, despite the fact that everyone knew that if there ever was an insane person in the history of humanity, it must have been Richard Chase. In cases such as these, law seems to be constructed so as to consider mental health issues and non-premeditated nature of the crimes as mitigating factors... unless the crimes are so horrific that the defendant simply has to die, procedural issues be damned.
My second example is Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. Now he also killed himself so we don't know what strategy he would've adopted if he were to defend himself in court; but, for the sake of the argument, let's assume he'd plead insanity. He'd have lost, because in the eyes of the law if the crime is premeditated, you're not legally insane. And his shooting rampage was incredibly deliberate, though out and prepared in great detail. He managed to murder 32 people and wound many others. That kind of preparation, intensionality and efficiency would leave him with no chance of defending an insanity plea. And yet, if Seung-Hui Cho wasn't insane, then I don't know who is. (And, before the shooting, the authorities themselves recognized this; he was put into court-ordered mental health therapy, for example.) The notion that crazy people can't be deliberate and premeditated in their actions is just wrong.
not exactly... check out the McNaughton Rule, which is still in place in a number of jurisdictions:
ReplyDeleteThe rule created a presumption of sanity, unless the defense proved "at the time of committing the act, the accused was laboring under such a defect of 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 what he was doing was wrong."
More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%27Naghten_Rules
The issue would go to a jury. They would have to decide whether his behavior comported with the elements to prove him not guilty. I personally think the insanity standards are confusing at best, but still maintain that someone can suffer from a) lack of knowledge about the nature of their acts or b) not know that their actions are wrong while taking preparatory steps toward an outcome that we find extreme, like death. I'm not sure what the cases say, but will try to do a little more research.
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