Word: hinckley
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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...
...Hinckley, the solitary third child of an oil-rich Colorado family, had spent the past few years idling through the Sunbelt, collecting guns, living on junk food, watching television. He became obsessed with Actress Jodie Foster, who starred in Taxi Driver, a movie about a loner who tries to shoot a presidential candidate. Hinckley wrote again and again to the unknowing Foster, the last time from Washington: "I will admit to you that the reason I'm going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you." Then he took...
Since April, Hinckley has been given psychiatric examinations by the defense, the court and the prosecution. The Government, according to a lawyer familiar with the case, decided he was competent to stand trial and was probably sane when he shot Reagan. Hinckley and his lawyers now have 30 days to decide whether to plead not guilty by reason of insanity or to change his plea to guilty. He faces five terms of life imprisonment...