ROGER SIMON COLUMN
SEPTEMBER 21, 2005
WASHINGTON - - Once again, John Hinckley wants to spend more time outside the mental institution he has been locked up in since 1982.
He wants to visit his parents and, one of his psychologists now says, "to have a girlfriend" and "intimate contact with a female."
And you can't blame him. Which is the problem. You can't blame him for anything.
Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan and three other people on March 30, 1981. But Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and has been locked up in St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Washington, DC, for the last 23 years.
This is far longer than most murderers are locked up, let alone attempted murderers, but Hinckley, 50, can (and may) be kept locked up forever, even though most people accept the premise that if you don't know the difference between right and wrong, you ought not be punished for your acts.
In our society, we cure sick people. We treat them therapeutically, not punitively.
Unless they shoot the president of the United States, that is.
After Hinckley was found not guilty, Congress and half the states enacted laws making it more difficult to use the insanity defense.
Even before the new laws were passed, however, insanity was a very rare defense that failed about 75 percent of the time.
(It is also a defense largely restricted to middle- and upper-class defendants. You rarely see a poor person, represented by a public defender, using the insanity defense because psychiatric research and testimony cost a lot of money.)
As a reporter, I covered one famous insanity defense case on a daily basis: the trial of John Wayne Gacy, who strangled 33 young men and boys and buried 26 of them beneath the floorboards of his home in suburban Chicago. He was found guilty and was executed on May 10, 1994.
Another famous killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, who dismembered and partially ate 15 young men and boys in Milwaukee, also tried an insanity defense. It, too, failed and Dahmer was murdered in prison on Nov. 28, 1994, while serving 15 consecutive life sentences.
Insanity defenses are a big gamble, because they require the defendant to admit he committed the crimes.
And most insanity cases fail for the same reason: If a defendant truly cannot distinguish between right and wrong, then he should not do what most criminals do: try to cover up the crimes, lie about them, hide from the police, etc.
In Hinckley's case, however, he was arrested immediately and did not deny his actions.
So his insanity defense "worked", but he has been locked away for a long time. In the past, the Reagan family has opposed Hinckley's trips outside St. Elizabeths and the Secret Service has tailed him.
The therapists at St. Elizabeths say Hinckley's insanity is in "full remission" and that time outside the hospital and normal relationships will help him.
Which doesn't mean he will ever be released. Even though he is no longer front-page news, there is usually negative public reaction every time he asks for time away from his institution.
Just because the law says he is an innocent man, that doesn't mean he will ever be a free man.