Word: hinckleys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Those who support the insanity defense argue that it lends moral credence to criminal law. Perhaps the real problem is trying to find a formula that preserves the public's sanity. Put bluntly, acquittals such as Hinckley's insult our gut instincts and our primitive sense of justice. "Is Hinckley's crime," the trial prosecutor asked, "the crime of someone who does not know what he is doing and who is out of control, or is it the crime of someone who has an evil, twisted and perverted mind?" The difference between being sick and depressed, psychotic and merely...
...mental health reasons ... less than 2 percent of this tiny portion successfully plead insanity." None of those who assassinated, or attempted to assassinate, Robert F. Kennedy '48, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, President Gerald Ford or George Wallace, were acquitted by reason of insanity. John Hinckley was the highly publicized exception to a little used rule...
...start of the Hinckley trial, polls showed that 87 percent of the public believed that too many murderers were using the insanity plea to avoid jail. Reagan adviser Edwin Meese III, quoted as saying that reform of the defense would help "rid the streets of the most dangerous people... out there," failed to understand what a recent Harvard Law Review article made clear...
...American public, the Hinckley acquittal became the symbol of excessive, and indulged, violence. To Caplan it is neither a judicial coup or rallying point, just a necessary working of an inviolate standard. Administration fingers, tinkering with the defense, will only reveal an injudicious strong...
What could be stopped, of course, is the ability of the sick to purchase firearms. Though John Hinckley was under psychiatric care and taking prescriptive drugs long before the shootings, he succeeded in buying guns on ten different occasions...