John Hinckley is going to be released from supervision
John Hinckley, who forty years ago attempted – and nearly accomplished – the assassination of President Reagan (and also wounded several others), is being released without conditions. The idea is that his mental illness is in remission and he is no longer dangerous.
Hinckley’s fate and his release rest on the fact that he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. That means that he was never imprisoned, but has instead spent years in a mental hospital, and then more recently under various types of supervision but outside of that hospital:
In 2015, Hinckley was spending unsupervised time with his mother, and his family made the first petition for him to be released from the custody of St. Elizabeths. In 2016, a federal judge granted Hinckley “full-time convalescent leave” from the hospital to live with his mother, contingent upon Hinckley carrying a GPS-equipped cell phone monitored by Secret Service agents.
Those four years between 2016 and 2020 involved an incremented progression of allowing Hinckley to live outside of his mother’s home, easing of monitoring, and a restoration of his name and speech rights.
The supervision is now supposed to end in June:
Hinckley is now 66 years old, and his mother is ailing, which affected the urgency of this ruling. His court-imposed restrictions include regular doctor and therapist visits to oversee the psychiatric medication he receives, as well as decisions on when and how often he attends individual and group therapy sessions. Once these restrictions are gone, and Hinckley has no family connections, will he be able to continue this maintenance?
This actually is a rather tough case, because an argument could be made – and was made successfully at his trial – that Hinckley was suffering from some variety of mental illness when he committed his crime, and he was judged not guilty as a result under the laws of the time. Those laws have since been changed, in part as a result of Hinckley’s case:
At his 1982 trial in Washington, D.C., having been charged with 13 offenses, Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity on June 21. The defense psychiatric reports portrayed Hinckley as insane while the prosecution reports characterized him as legally sane. Hinckley was transferred into psychiatric care from Bureau of Prisons custody on August 18, 1981. Soon after his trial, Hinckley wrote that the shooting was “the greatest love offering in the history of the world” and was disappointed that Foster did not reciprocate his love.
The verdict resulted in widespread dismay. As a consequence, the United States Congress and a number of states revised laws governing when a defendant may use the insanity defense in a criminal prosecution. Idaho, Montana, and Utah abolished the defense altogether. In the United States, before the Hinckley case, the insanity defense had been used in less than 2% of all felony cases and was unsuccessful in almost 75% of those trials. Public outcry over the verdict led to the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, which altered the rules for consideration of mental illness of defendants in federal criminal court proceedings. In 1985, Hinckley’s parents wrote Breaking Points, a book detailing their son’s mental condition.
Changes in federal and some state rules of evidence laws have since excluded or restricted the use of testimony of an expert witness, such as a psychologist or psychiatrist, regarding conclusions on “ultimate” issues in insanity defense cases, including whether a criminal defendant is legally “insane”, but this is not the rule in most states.
Vincent J. Fuller, an attorney who represented Hinckley during his trial and for several years afterward, said Hinckley has schizophrenia. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist who testified for the prosecution, diagnosed Hinckley with narcissistic and schizoid personality disorders and dysthymia, as well as borderline and passive-aggressive features. At the hospital Hinckley was treated for narcissistic and schizotypal personality disorder and major depressive disorder.
Hinckley’s crime was an especially heinous one: attempted assassination of a president. It was only “attempted” not because Hinckley didn’t try very very hard to kill Reagan, but because he didn’t succeed in his goal although he nearly killed him. And press secretary James Brady, whom Hinckley wounded, was disabled for the rest of his life, and his death 33 years was ruled a homicide (although for various legal reasons, Hinckley could no longer be tried for it).
In some basic way, it seems as though Hinckley should not be released, although I’m well aware that on the legal level there’s nothing really holding him anymore since he was never convicted. On the practical level, it seems to me that his dangerousness – and whether he will continue to take his meds – is impossible to predict, and so I don’t think the supervision should have been lifted.
Is this an application of “Hard cases make bad law”?
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_cases_make_bad_law . . .
“The maxim dates at least to 1837, when a judge, ruling in favor of a parent against the maintenance of her children, said, ‘We have heard that hard cases make bad law.’ The judge’s wording suggests that the phrase was not new then.
“Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. made a utilitarian argument for this in his judgment of Northern Securities Co. v. United States (1904): ‘Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their importance… but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment.’
“Holmes’s dissenting opinion in the case, which applied the Sherman Antitrust Act to the securities company, has been described as a reaction to President Theodore Roosevelt’s wish to dramatize the issues of monopolies and trusts.”
If I were Jodie Foster, I’d start investing in increased security STAT.
I suspect the big shots who signed the release papers used disappearing ink.
If Hinkley commits another crime, I think the appropriate consequence for the medical officials that signed off on his release is the loss of their license to practice and mandatory civil damages for the victim’s closest relatives.
The desire to help the mentally ill is admirable. The hubris that imagines an ability to cure is reprehensible.
Psychologists, psychiatrists, politicians and social workers should face the consequences of their actions just like anyone else. The graver the offense, the graver the proportionate consequence.
Did anybody ever break the news to him that Jody Foster is married to a woman?
I got my BA is psych in 66. With apologies to Neo, my takeaway is that they don’t know nearly as much as they want you to think they do. Or that they think they do.
Ellkins, in 59, wrote a book on Slavery. Reread it a couple of months ago. Didn’t wear well. He went hard on Freud, who’s barely a punchline now.
Did anybody ever break the news to him that Jody Foster is married to a woman?
Not to worry– the Jenner formerly known as Bruce will fix him up with an accommodating endocrinologist and a surgeon so that he can become a transwoman– and steal Jodie away from her current wife.
In response to Walter’s question I was going to offer that its not just some women who think that the right woman could straighten out a gay man. That the reverse holds true as well.
But I have to say that I like PA+Cat’s response much better.
“And press secretary James Brady, whom Hinckley wounded, was disabled for the rest of his life, and his death 33 years was ruled a homicide”
Did you mean 33 years later, or 33 years ago?
Thirty-three years later, I think.
I just don’t know if people with these severe psychiatric disorders are ever “cured.” Someone should take responsibility to see Hinckley doesn’t get hold of any pot.
theduchessofkitty:
The word “later” should have been in there.
Hinckley used a rather puny 3″ barreled .22LR revolver, but he used exploding bullets. A tiny primer charge loaded into the bullet’s hollow point. I read about this many years ago, and knew that the bullet that hit Reagan only hit soft tissue and did not explode. I wasn’t sure about Brady.
From Nat. Review:
Urban legend indeed. The military does have some very serious exploding bullets used in .50 cal. guns.
“The military does have some very serious exploding bullets used in .50 cal. guns.”
For Anti-Materiel Use only, of course 😛
Well, armor-piercing is often anti-material (e.g. busting engine blocks), but often not too.
In the Iraq war, sniper Marine Staff Sgt. Steve Reichert spotted two combatants with an RPG weapon and extra rockets walk into range of our troops and hide behind a concrete block wall while preparing. Reichert just happened to have a few Raufoss rounds for his Barrett sniper rifle and he fired one at the correct point on the concrete wall resulting in two kills.
I am divided on this. I haven’t met many people who can be that supervised, and then just go out and take their meds on their own. Nearly every person I know with an actual illness usually can’t take their meds without supervision (or even with) with full regularity.
OTOH, had Hinkley just pled guilty and done his time, he would have been out on parole a decade ago probably, and would be free and clear today parole or not (as he would have run the statutory maximum time in jail).
He fulfilled the law as written. Sometimes we have to just realize that we did our best, and move on in that situation. As Roper was told, we have to give even the Devil the benefit of law, for our own sake.
Another example of why the courts should have a “guilty but insane” result. Treat the insanity and then serve the time for the crime. No one doubts that Hinckley shot the president and others, yet the verdict pretends no one committed the crime.
But he WAS sane enough to use hollow point bullets….
}} John Hinckley … is being released without conditions.
I’m sure Jodi Foster is thrilled.
She’s a liberal twit, so I’m not all that concerned, but it’s got a certain amusement factor, nonetheless.