Word: hinckleys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...John Hinckley Jr., who had fired a revolver full of explosive bullets at President Ronald Reagan to prove his love for Movie Actress Jodie Foster, had been acquitted of attempted assassination. The young drifter who shot his way onto history's center stage stood silently at the defense table, closed his vacuous eyes, and tilted back his head...
...JoAnn Hinckley, the defendant's mother, covered her face. She sobbed, embraced her husband and then, though she tried not to, she smiled. So did her husband, the Colorado oil millionaire who last year kicked their boy out of the house and this month wept as he testified: "I wish to God I could trade places with him right now." But the dull blue eyes of their wayward son, pasted like wafers on his expressionless face, avoided the gaze of those in the courtroom through the very end. What emotions swirled in his twisted psyche-a mystery that neither...
...everyone involved but the phlegmatic Hinckley, the trauma of deciding his fate-a process that cost as much as $2.5 million*-was a wrenching ordeal. In the end, the awesome responsibility of sorting out the conflicting testimony and bewildering law fell on five men and seven women. A janitor, a cafeteria worker, a garage attendant, all but one black, they were not a jury of Hinckley's peers except in the legal sense. For 24 hours spread over four days they vacillated until, almost as an act of despair, they reached a decision that left them uneasy and bitter...
...John Hinckley's bullets seemed to hit dangerously close to the heart of a nation, his acquittal struck explosively at its sense of moral righteousness. Said Bell County, Texas, District Attorney Arthur Eads: "Only in the U.S. can a man try to assassinate the leader of the country in front of 125 million people and be found not guilty." That fact, insisted well-known Wyoming Trial Lawyer Gerry Spence, proves "we're a people of law and compassion." But most Americans agreed with Eads that the verdict was symptomatic of runaway leniency in the system. A nationwide poll...
...focus of most of the outrage was the insanity defense (see following story). "It's the system which found him innocent that's insane," editorialized Hinckley's home-town newspaper, the Denver Post. California Governor Jerry Brown denounced "a legal system that totally disregards the issue of guilt or innocence and instead relies on so-called psychiatric experts to tell us whether a man who committed a deliberate attack should be acquitted because he watched too many movies." On Capitol Hill, shock at the verdict was quickly translated into pressure for legislation. "This case demonstrates there...