| The
verdict of "not guilty"
for reason of insanity in the 1982 trial of John Hinckley, Jr. for his
attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan stunned and outraged
many Americans. An ABC News poll taken the day after the verdict
showed 83% of those polled thought "justice was not done" in the
Hinckley
case. Some people--without much evidence--attributed the verdict
to an anti-Reagan bias on the part the Washington, D. C. jury of eleven
blacks and one white. Many more people, however, blamed a legal
system
that they claimed made it too easy for juries to return "not guilty"
verdicts
in insanity cases--despite the fact that such pleas were made in only
2%
of felony cases and failed over 75% of the time. Public
pressure
resulting from the Hinckley verdict spurred Congress and most states
into
enacting major reforms of laws governing the use of the insanity
defense.
The
Hinckley trial highlights
the difficulty of a system that forces jurors to label a defendant
either
"sane" or "insane" when the defendant may in fact be close to the
middle
on a spectrum ranging from Star Trek's Mr. Spock to the person who
strangles
his wife thinking that he's squeezing a grapefruit. [CONTINUED]
|
