In 1843, Daniel M’Naghten (left) killed the secretary of the Prime Minister of England. Medical evidence introduced at his murder trial indicated that he suffered paranoid delusions, leading to his acquittal and eventually to judicial recognition of something like the modern insanity defense.
After a period of expansion in the mid-twentieth century, the insanity defense has been progressively restricted since John Hinckley’s successful use of the defense during his trial on charges arising from his attempted assassination of President Reagan. Janie Kim now recounts the story of the “incredible shrinking insanity defense,” as she calls it, in a fascinating new paper on SSRN.
She focuses particularly on the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in Clark v. Arizona.
The legislative backstory to Clark parallels the aftermath of the Hinckley case. Much as many U.S. jurisdictions acted to narrow the insanity defense in response to public outrage over Hinckley’s use of the defense, Arizona restricted the defense following the acquittal of Mark Austin for the murder of his estranged wife, Laura Griffin-Austin. Indeed, “Laura’s Law,” along with subsequent decisions by the state supreme court, arguably made Arizona the toughest state in the nation on mentally ill criminal defendants.
The inevitable constitutional challenge came in the case of Eric Clark, a schizophrenic teenager convicted of first-degree murder for killing a police officer. Clark raised two issue in the U.S. Supreme Court. First, he argued that Arizona had violated the Due Process Clause by eliminating the so-called cognitive prong from the M’Naghten insanity test. In rejecting this challenge, the Court declined Clark’s implicit invitation to constitutionalize the insanity defense.
Second, Clark argued that the state also violated the Due Process Clause by limiting his ability to present mental health evidence in support of his claim that he lacked the requisite mens rea for first-degree murder. In rejecting this claim, the Court interpreted the Arizona law narrowly to exclude only expert opinion evidence and indicated that states may properly preclude the use of such evidence to negate mens rea.
Janie’s paper, entitled “The Story of Clark v. Arizona: The Incredible Shrinking Insanity Defense,” appears as a chapter in Criminal Law Stories (Weisberg & Coker, eds. 2010).
By some coincidence, the Seventh Circuit issued a fascinating new opinion on the insanity defense at about the same time I wrote this post. In Wilson v. Gaetz (No. 09-2111), the court (per Judge Posner) vacated a district judge’s denial of habeas relief and remanded for an evidentiary hearing. Wilson was convicted of first-degree murder in Illinois state court. He had raised an insanity defense, but contended in his habeas petition that his lawyer had botched the presentation of expert evidence in support of the defense. The Seventh Circuit agreed that his lawyer had provided unreasonably poor representation, particularly in relying on an expert who had evaluated Wilson’s fitness to stand trial, not his sanity at the time he committed the offense. The Seventh Circuit remanded for a hearing on prejudice. The case includes an interesting (and expansive) interpretation of the so-called “deific decree” doctrine. Judge Evans dissented, suggesting that Wilson’s lawyer may have had sound tactical reasons for doing what he did.
Thanks to Tom Shriner for drawing my attention to this case!