Word: hinckleys
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Lincoln Caplan, a lawyer by training and frequent contributor to the New Yorker, manages in his book, The Insanity Defense and the Trial of John W. Hinckley Jr., to do what his friends in the press had little time to do. He has sifted the evidence, researched the precedents, and projected the Hinckley case outside itself and into a more general and philosophical consideration of the issues. All the while, he subtly weaves his argument and day by day New Yorker-style descriptions ("Jo Ann Moore Hinckley ... wore a salmon-pink outfit, with Peter Pan collar and bow, and spoke...
...Hinckley's are not the only delusions put on trial in Caplan's book; with him go much of the present Administration's legal thinking and some of that widespread and misinformed public opinion. Caplan's treatment of the insanity defense aims at discouraging us from seeing the defense as one or all of the following: an overused and therefore dangerous "legal loophole" (the words are, ironically, Richard M. Nixon's): a play-trial toy of the rich (the usual tabloid lore), or, thirdly, a legal contradiction (the view of behaviorists, who see free will as an illusion and absolve...
...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...