Crime

What's Crazy And What's Just Mad

Even if jurors believe someone was out of his mind when he murdered, they don't like finding ‘crazy’ people not guilty by reason of insanity.

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Mental health defenses to charges of murder are tough ones to win.  Even if jurors believe someone was out of his mind when he murdered, they don’t like finding “crazy” people not guilty by reason of insanity.

The defenses are nuanced and the devil’s in the details.  Take the following examples:

Case 1. A man learns that his wife was raped by the local bar keeper.  The husband is in the military and knows how to use a gun.  The wife comes in bruised, bleeding, clothes torn, ejaculate from the recent attack still on her leg.

The husband grabs his luger, walks to the barroom, and shoots the bartender dead.  He then turns himself in to police, gun in hand.  His defense attorney interposes a defense of “temporary insanity.”  He couldn’t control his actions. Anyone in his shoes would have done the same — the man was blinded by rage and an overpowering need to stop the rapist. The prosecutor says the husband acted out of unadulterated anger.  The husband could have called the police rather than take matters into his own hands.  He wasn’t insane, he was just enraged.

Case 2.  A young man starts hearing voices.  He believes he’s been sent on a mission by the CIA to kill aliens.  He goes to his parents’ home and glimpses a book on the Columbine shootings.  He interprets it as a message to kill.  That night, his father watches him pacing the apartment and tries to calm him down. The son, believing the father to be an alien, picks up a long kitchen knife and stabs him to death.  He’s arrested hours later running naked through Central Park.

Case 3. A woman working as a nanny in an Upper East Side apartment takes care of two small children for years without incident.  At some point, she starts hearing voices and can’t sleep.  She becomes less patient with the children, and one day loses control and stabs the children to death in the bathtub, then plunges the knife into her own neck.  The prosecutor argues the nanny wasn’t insane, but acted from uncontrollable rage.  She was angry at how she was treated and wanted higher pay.

Here’s the problem with these cases.  One might argue that any murder (unless out of self-defense) is irrational and therefore insane.  Yet pure anger and an inability to control it has never been an excuse for murder.  That makes sense — as a society we can’t have people getting pissed-off then harming or killing others without repercussion.  But it’s hard to know where anger stops and insanity begins.

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In the above examples it worked out this way:

Case 1 was taken from the plot of the old bestseller “Anatomy of a Murder” by former Michigan Supreme Court Judge John Voelker, writing under the pen name Robert Traver.  (A great read and movie if you’re looking for a courtroom thriller.)  The war-hero husband is acquitted thanks to brilliant lawyering and the fact that the accused was a creep.  However, the defense — temporary insanity, also known as “irresistible impulse” — doesn’t apply in most states.  It’s thought to be too vague, too easy to invoke, and too convenient an excuse for losing one’s temper.  There’s no need for the defendant to have any history of prior mental illness and he accused can act rationally immediately after the act and still prevail in the defense.  Most states view it as excusing the inexcusable.

In Case 2, I persuaded the prosecutor to accept a plea of not guilty “by reason of mental incapacity or defect.”  The defendant had a history of mental illness, was laboring under a profound misconception of reality, and could not distinguish right from wrong at the point he murdered his father.  He is now committed to a civil institution where he will remain until he is believed to be “not dangerous” to himself or others.  Although he’s doing well and his family waits for him to come home, he’s likely to spend at least the next decade or more institutionalized.

Case 3 is the most recent and perhaps most interesting.  Last week, after a very long trial but only a two-day deliberation, the jury rejected the defense of insanity and found nanny Yoselyn Ortega guilty of murder.  She had all the hallmarks of being insane at the time of the killings — she believed Satan told her to kill the children, she’d heard voices since she was a teenager but never got psychiatric help, and two days before the event, she’d finally sought out a psychiatrist.  Prosecutors argued that she resented her employer, had been berated by her in public, and knew exactly what she was doing when she brutally stabbed six-year-old Lucia Krim and slit the throat of her brother. When the children’s mother found them in the bathroom, Ortega plunged a knife into her own neck in a suicide attempt.

Although jurors were split when deliberations began, they quickly moved toward a verdict of guilt.  According to one juror: “It came down to proof. We could not find strongly, credible proof that the defendant was not aware [of the difference between right and wrong].”

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In New York, the defense must prove an insanity defense by a preponderance of the evidence.  The test is to show that the defendant did not understand the nature or consequences of her action or that the conduct was wrong. Different states have different tests and some states — Idaho, Kansas, Montana, and Utah — don’t permit an insanity defense at all.

For those states where insanity is a defense, winning comes down to several factors: the strength of defense experts; the agility of the defense attorney; and the horribleness of the crime.

Jurors are human beings after all, and I’m convinced that the more gruesome the crime the less likely they are to find the perpetrator not guilty by reason of insanity.  This may be in part due to their belief that if they find the defendant not guilty he will be released back into public society.  This is not the case.  A not-guilty verdict means psychiatric institutionalization often for life.

The other part may be a simple desire to hold everyone accountable for his actions, no matter how crazy the person may have been at the time of the crime. To quote the judge in Anatomy of a Murder, “For all my concern and reverence for the law I sometimes ruefully suspect that the average murder jury really decides its cases regardless of the law.”

Toni Messina has tried over 100 cases and has been practicing criminal law and immigration since 1990. You can follow her on Twitter: @tonitamess.

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