Five years after the publication of Thinking About the Insanity Defense, the insanity defense remains as controversial and current as it was then, and as much in the public view. With the publicity over the December 2009 Fort Hood massacre of military personnel by a major in the service, that scrutiny will continue and undoubtedly intensify. And with such continuing interest, this volume answers the need to review briefly the essentials of the defense and to go beyond the earlier volume by including materials on terrorism, by expanding the focus on religion, by addressing the impact of neuroscience on the legal foundations of free will and criminal responsibility, by reassessing the role that psychopathy may play in the defense, and by considering what each of the insanity defense standards offers or does not offer to the law.
The insanity defense spurred a storm of controversy when John Hinckley, Jr., who attempted to assassinate President Reagan, was found not guilty by reason of insanity. And now, a quarter century later, a similar controversy has emerged in efforts to understand the motivation of the Fort Hood killer and to determine how legally to proceed . In fact, the insanity defense, though rarely invoked, is, when entered in high profile cases, the most prominent and controversial interaction between the mental health and the legal systems.
The insanity defense remains one of the most talked about and controversial interactions between a deterministic psychological approach to human behavior and a free will based legal approach. An excellent example of the way in which our legal system has emphasized psychology rather than religion or sociology or economics or biology, the insanity defense has raised questions which lie at the root of our political views of society, our moral and religious notions of good and evil, our medical and psychological conclusions about healing and sickness, our philosophical ideas about free will and determinism, and our linguistic concerns about language and semantics.
As is generally known, the criminal law attempts to hold people accountable for their actions. The insanity defense, on the contrary, attempts to excuse some individuals from responsibility for their actions on the theory that their legal insanity prevented them from choosing the lawful act, knowing what they were doing, or understanding that their action was wrong. Two incompatible, contradictory theories about what motivates human meet in the insanity defense: the modern determinist theory of causation which underlies psychology, neuroscience, and related disciplines, and the continuing free will theory of morality which underlies the criminal law.
As stated in the earlier volume, however individual cases are resolved, the controversy remains because two great theories about human nature and human action are involved: the criminal justice theory that individuals of their own free will choose to act as they do and ought to be punished for wrongful acts; and the psychological and modern scientific theory that individuals’ actions are determined by their personality, genes, environment, and other factors largely beyond their control and ought rather to be understood and helped. When terrorism is added to the volatile mix the controversy captures even more public interest and concern.
Much has happened since that earlier book was published in 2005. At the time of its publication, there was controversy over the conviction of Andrea Yates for killing her children. Andrea Yates had then been recently convicted of murder for killing her children by methodically drowning them in the bathtub. Her insanity defense had failed. Insanity, as that book detailed and this volume summarizes, is a legal, not a psychological concept, and the law provides tests or standards to determine whether the facts of a case fit that legal defense. The general public as well as those who represented Yates and those they engaged to testify for the prosecution or the defense pointed to varying explanations for her motivation to kill. Among the most prominent explanations for her behavior were those derived from psychology, an increasing mental illness for which she had been hospitalized and received some, though often inadequate, treatment; from biology, postpartum depression leading to psychosis; from religion, as she had received religious instruction from a radical preacher whose teachings she had followed; from simple opportunity, afforded by the hour-long time she had daily between her husband's leaving for work and her mother-in-law's arrival to help and to supervise her; from suicidology, as her previous suicidal ideation and gestures had now turned outward to homicide; and from the media, especially as one psychiatrist testified that Yates had copied a television drama in which a mother drowned her children and then escaped punishment through a successful insanity plea. After listening to the many explanations and to expert testimony about them, the jury concluded that Yates was not insane, but was guilty of murder.
Yates was sentenced to prison but sent to the mental health unit of the state correctional system. While she was legally guilty, the state recognized her serious mental problems. The Texas appellate court, however, overturned her conviction that year. It concluded that the testimony of the psychiatrist about the television drama, for which he had been a consultant, but which had not aired, was false. Yates's motivation could not have derived from the acts and the successful insanity plea in that television drama.
In a later, second trial of Andrea Yates, everything was the same inside the courtroom except for a different jury and the testimony of that psychiatrist which did not then include anything about that television drama. But outside the courtroom, starting with the horrific events in the case and continuing through all the pretrial, trial, and posttrial coverage, the intense and widespread comments about it caused many to reconsider the entire case including the jury's verdict. Some considered her husband or her preacher or her clinicians or any number of others to have been central to her debilitated condition and to her extreme acts, and that led some to consider the jury's verdict mistaken.
As the materials in this volume indicate, the jury in her second trial found Andrea Yates not guilty by reason of insanity. Though not guilty, she remained in a secure mental hospital setting. So, aside from the labeling of her as either guilty or not guilty by reason of insanity, the practical consequence of the two trials remained much the same for Andrea Yates. And the intermingling of psychological, religious, and related factors in her case remain relevant to this volume, though the addition of terrorism does not. Because Andrea Yates did not seek to spread fear to other mothers or to those suffering from postpartum depression or psychosis, or to society in general, no one considered her acts to be those of a terrorist. Undoubtedly, fear and terror seized her victims as she drowned them, but her motive did not appear to derive from terrorism. In that respect she is similar to many others who have killed while motivated by rage or jealousy or any other human emotion. Some have had mental disorders as well and have pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Despite those disorders, most of those who enter such a plea have been found criminally responsible.
Now, as this book is published, equally notorious cases are capturing the public attention and raising new controversies, about the definition of a terrorist and about whether those considered terrorists are mentally ill enough to have an insanity plea available to them. The earlier volume dismissed that suggestion in a brief answer, but the current case of the Fort Hood killer most explicitly, and potentially of some of the other cases as well, has brought it up in a more significant way, raising all of the issues that this volume on insanity, religion, and terrorism considers. Throughout 2010s and well beyond, this new case and others will resonate whenever the insanity plea is considered.
In briefly summarizing the most relevant case, these facts seemed important to the subject of this book. Nidal Hasan, then 39 years old, an Army major, a military psychiatrist, was the son of Muslim parents who emigrated from Palestine to Virginia. He was unmarried and characterized as a loner. His military service involved treated military personnel who were suffering psychological disorders from their tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He wrote and spoke favorably about jihadists, corresponded with an influential Islamist terrorist, contacted prosecutors to inform them of acts his patients had committed which he considered illegal. He had business cards printed with SoA (SWT) on them, the one referring to Soldier of Allah and the other meaning Subhanahu Wu Ta'ala or Glory to God. He used a first name on his official email of Abduwall, meaning slave of God, rather than his actual first name. It was said that he shouted Allahu Akbar as he opened fire in a military installation building in Texas killing thirteen and wounding thirty-two. He was charged with thirteen counts of premeditated murder and thirty-two counts of attempted murder. These and other emerging facts make clear that discussion of the case will involve all three elements in the title of this book, insanity, religion, and terrorism. In this instance, insanity stands for both the mental disorders used to advance the legal defense and the insanity defense itself. A more detailed presentation of the case later in the book explains the variety of responses that have been made to a discussion of his motivation. Suffice it to say here that Hasan's defense lawyer has indicated he will consider an insanity defense.
While the earlier volume filled a special need as it answered almost one hundred of the most frequently asked questions about the defense, this volume fills an additional need. It answers in a concise and easily available format the most frequently asked questions about the insanity defense and its relation to religion and to terrorism as well as to mental disorder. Beyond the expansion of discussion to include more about terrorism and religion and mental disorder, this volume revisits an earlier topic of brainwashing and its related deprogramming or reeducation, as well as the emerging influence of neuroscience and law on the continuing controversy about free will and responsibility. Finally, this volume summarizes the various arguments favoring each of the possible insanity defense standards. And, like the earlier volume, this book encourages further exploration of the subject through a comprehensive bibliography as it focuses, in the editor’s view, on the importance of thinking about the insanity defense.
