Word: mentality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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," the attorneys contend in their brief, "there will be great rage and anger directed at Mr. Hinckley." The best guess of lawyers familiar with the case is that Judge Parker will rule in favor of a conventional, single-jury trial...
...spring of 1980, when thousands of Cubans were mobbing the port city of Mariel for their helter-skelter exodus to the shores of Florida, President Fidel Castro denounced the emigrants as escoria (scum). As if to ensure that he was at least partly correct, Castro added some convicts and mental patients to the Mariel horde. Indeed, of the 125,000 "Marielitos" who landed in Florida, 1,709 have been jailed by federal authorities as undesirables, and 587 more have been locked up until they can find sponsors. Nearly all the rest have settled in Dade County, which includes Miami...
...last March that society should not hold him accountable for his actions? That is the decision that will soon confront twelve jurors in Washington, D.C. If they accept the contention of Hinckley's lawyers that he was legally insane, the would-be assassin will be confined to a mental hospital until a judge concludes that he is no longer a threat to himself or fellow citizens. Then he may go scot free...
Defendants have had little incentive to employ this defense, since the best hope it offered was usually a lifetime in a wretched mental hospital. In recent years, advances in drugs and psychotherapy, along with a trend toward returning mental patients to their communities, have reduced the average length of confinement. In New York State, the past 15 years have seen a sixfold increase in successful insanity pleas-from eight a year to 50. But the tendency to turn such patients loose has also led to a growing public perception that the streets are filling up with dangerous defendants who were...
...jurors sent out for sandwiches, and took a written ballot at 8:30 p.m. No more undecideds. Eight votes to acquit, four to convict. One of the four, Pat Sweeney, the other assistant principal, said she had put a lot of weight on the youth's confinements in mental institutions. Pat Walshe, the lawyer, persuaded her that this was irrelevant, since they had never been told why Terry had been confined. Sweeney erased her reason from the blackboard, the first changed vote, an important turning point. A third ballot at 10 p.m. showed eleven to acquit, one to convict...