Friday's Wall Street Journal says it all. ObamaCare: Repeal, Replace or What?

Editor's Note: We have asked five opponents of government directed health care to give their thoughts....

Well that about says it all. Not one individual who supported the new Health Care Legislation was asked to explain why even parts of the new law are any damned good. Murdoch has made WSJ the Fox News for newspapers;  unfair and unbalanced.

And it's a damn shame.

The Trouble with the Insanity Defense by D. J.  Jaffe.

Jaffe tells the story about a young man by the name of Mark Becker who killed a nationally known high-school coach. In order to get a little more information of how this trial proceeded  see this.

Earlier this month, 24-year-old Mark Becker was found guilty of killing Satan... Of course, it wasn't really Satan Mr. Becker killed. It was his beloved high school football coach, Ed Thomas. But Mr. Becker, being severely mentally ill and off his medication, didn't know the difference.

And as ESPN notes:

Though the defense doesn't dispute that Becker shot Thomas, and prosecutors agree that Becker suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, the question is Becker's mental status on the morning he shot Thomas. To prove Becker is insane, the defense had to show he didn't understand the nature and quality of his acts and he wasn't able to distinguish right from wrong.

Experts testified for both parties during the trial, and naturally disagree. There are basically two different types of 'tests' for a jury to use to render an insanity verdict and it depends upon the venue for the trial.  

Here is a nice short summary of insanity defenses relevant to these issues:

The McNaughton Rule--not knowing right from wrong.

 

The first famous legal test for insanity came in 1843, in the McNaughton case. Englishman Daniel McNaughton shot and killed the secretary of the British Prime Minister, believing that the Prime Minister was conspiring against him. The court acquitted McNaughton "by reason of insanity," and he was placed in a mental institution for the rest of his life. However, the case caused a public uproar, and Queen Victoria ordered the court to develop a stricter test for insanity.

The "McNaughton rule" was a standard to be applied by the jury, after hearing medical testimony from prosecution and defense experts. The rule created a presumption of sanity, unless the defense proved "at the time of committing the act, the accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing or, if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong."

The McNaughton rule became the standard for insanity in the United States and the United Kingdom, and is still the standard for insanity in almost half of the states.

The Durham Rule--Irresistible Impulse

Monte Durham was a 23-year-old who had been in and out of prison and mental institutions since he was 17. He was convicted for housebreaking in 1953, and his attorney appealed. Although the district court judge had ruled that Durham's attorneys had failed to prove he didn't know the difference between right and wrong, the federal appellate judge chose to use the case to reform the McNaughton rule.

Citing leading psychiatrists and jurists of the day, the appellate judge stated that the McNaughton rule was based on "an entirely obsolete and misleading conception of the nature of insanity." He overturned Durham's conviction and established a new rule. The Durham rule states "that an accused is not criminally responsible if his unlawful act was the product of mental disease or mental defect."

The Durham rule was eventually rejected by the federal courts, because it cast too broad a net. Alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, and drug addicts had successfully used the defense to defeat a wide variety of crimes.

The Model Penal Code

In 1972, the American Law Institute, a panel of legal experts, developed a new rule for insanity as part of the Model Penal Code. This rule says that a defendant is not responsible for criminal conduct where (s)he, as a result of mental disease or defect, did not possess "substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law." This new rule was based on the District of Columbia Circuit's decision in the federal appellate case, United States v. Brawner, 471 F.2d 969 (1972).

Obviously, this standard is very vague. It leaves a number of factors up to the jury to determine, given the facts of a case and the testimony of experts. About half the states have adopted the Model Penal Code rule for insanity.

THE FEDERAL RULE

In 1984, Congress passed, and President Ronald Reagan signed, the Comprehensive Crime Control Act. The federal insanity defense now requires the defendant to prove, by "clear and convincing evidence," that "at the time of the commission of the acts constituting the offense, the defendant, as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, was unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts" (18 U.S.C. § 17). This is generally viewed as a return to the "knowing right from wrong" standard. The Act also contained the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, 18 U.S.C. § 4241, which sets out sentencing and other provisions for dealing with offenders who are or have been suffering from a mental disease or defect. http://www.law.cornell.edu/background/insane/insanity.html

Now I am not against the jury system. It is the only means by which 'normal people' can tell the Executive, Legislative and Judicial Branches of government to go straight to hell, do not pass go and do not collect two hundred bucks.

Like Quantum Mechanics, the jury system puts chance into the mix which is not all bad. For heavens sakes we, as a nation, convict innocent people all the time. I know there really is no such thing as 'an innocent man' but we are supposed to be convicting people for the crimes they are charged with and not for things they probably already did in other contexts that forbid prosecution because of lack of evidence or whatever. In the crime dramas of our age, the cops and the prosecution sometimes 'fudge' in their testimonies and in their arguments for The Greater Good. I would venture a guess that this occurs all the time in the 'real world' as well.

I do not necessarily see this issue concerning the criminally insane to be a political one, necessarily. After you follow through on all the threads it certainly begins to reek of a political odor, but....

If we just put the criminally insane in insane asylums built for the criminally insane, what kind of accommodations are available for these sick people.

And if you are insane, how in the hell am I going to be safe in the knowledge that you will take your medications as required and see a priest of the scientific cloth for regular check-ups? And demonstrate to me with some certainty that if you do not take your meds, you not going to kill my child on her way home from school?

Suffice it to say that the defendant in the People vs. Mark Becker was out of his frickin mind.

ESPN misses one little gem that seems more than germane to the resulting guilty verdict:

Apparently, that didn't matter to the Iowa criminal justice system. Prior to issuing their verdict, the jury asked the judge what would happen if they found Mr. Becker "not guilty by reason of insanity" (NGBRI). The judge wouldn't answer, so the jury took the safe approach: "Guilty as charged." A psychotic young man obviously ...

You see what happened here, do you not? The jury knew damn well this kid was not guilty by reason of insanity and it did not matter which test that jury used; that was the only rational conclusion available to reasonable men and women.

Ah, Judge, your worship, if we were to find the man insane what exactly happens to him? I mean is this nut case going to be set free and end up residing next to my high school or community college? Does he move in with his sister just down the block from my folks? Does he end up working at Chuckie Cheese?

Or does he get his own reality show and make a million bucks?

Jaffe notes that we have a problem here. I mean you find someone Not Guilty By Reason of Insanity and he is set free and he refuses to take his medicine and he goes nuts again and somebody else dies. So what happens is that the offender is committed to the Insane Asylum for ever by court order in a 'civil proceeding.'

Just as an aside, I grew up with the propaganda that Russia never sent people to prison; they were sent to insane asylums because anyone that would break the law under a communist regime must be out of his frickin mind.

But according to Jaffe "More than 230,000 people with severe mental illnesses are currently incarcerated in America."

That is quite a number. If there are two and a half million people in our prisons, then ten percent of that population is insane by any measure or test.