Word: hinckley
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...standard of common sense, it was an insane act: shooting a President to win the affections of a movie star. The legal definition of madness, however, is a bit more exacting (see LAW). Last week lawyers for John Hinckley, 26, the man who wounded President Reagan and three others on March 30 outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, declared in a court brief that they will argue Hinckley's innocence by reason of insanity. In a case where the facts of the crime are so starkly clear-the defense admits to the shooting-an insanity plea may be Hinckley...
...demonstrate the slippery grip on reality his lawyers will claim for him, Hinckley has written a letter to TIME Washington Correspondent Evan Thomas elaborating on his one-sided courtship of Actress Jodie Foster, 18 (see box). Hinckley had written TIME several weeks earlier offering to answer any 20 questions the magazine posed. Thomas submitted the questions-on such subjects as Hinckley's childhood, his travels before the shooting and his friends-but Hinckley chose to address only his feelings about Foster. Atop the letter, Hinckley scrawled the title, The Lovesick Assassin...
...preliminary documents submitted to Federal District Court Judge Barrington Parker, Hinckley's attorneys asked that their client's case be heard by two separate juries, one to make the pro forma determination that Hinckley did indeed shoot Reagan, the other to make the critical judgment about his sanity. Hinckley's lawyers fear that once jurors see videotapes of the shooting and hear exhaustive FBI testimony about Hinckley's elaborate transcontinental drifting in the months that preceded the act, they would be incapable of reaching a verdict dispassionately on the question of his mental state. "Understandably...
That proceeding will not begin before December. Once it is under way, the insanity defense will likely require that Hinckley's lawyers-members of the high-powered Washington firm of Williams and Connolly, home of Superlawyer Edward Bennett Williams-introduce as evidence every token of his preoccupation with Foster. A new addition to that curious lore surfaced last week, when authorities leaked a transcript of tape recordings, made by Hinckley last winter, of two telephone conversations he had with Foster. The calls, to the actress's Yale University dormitory in New Haven, were not acknowledged by her until...
...tapes depict Hinckley as a persistent and pathetic suitor. As he tells Foster in the first call, by way of introduction: "This is the person that's been leaving notes in your mail box for two days." At one point during the conversations, Foster's freshmen roommates giggled in the background. "They're laughing at you," she said to Hinckley, and to the girls in an aside: "I should tell him I am sitting here with a knife." Hinckley heard the remark. "Well," he assured her, "I'm not dangerous, I promise you that...