Trans-formation

A year ago, President Barack Obama issued a proclamation naming June “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Pride Month.”  The proclamation effectively incorporated the transgendered community into President Bill Clinton’s 2000 proclamation, which named June “Gay & Lesbian Pride Month.”  In honor of the transgendered community, their legal rights, and the month of June, it seems appropriate to discuss gender identity discrimination and the infamous “trans panic defense.”

The overall struggle that transgender people face is similar to the struggle that gays and lesbians face, but for transgender people, the progressive change for their legal rights seems to be slower.  Currently, in 38 states it is still legal to discriminate based on gender identity.  Comparatively, 30 states have not yet developed laws against sexual orientation discrimination.  Wisconsin was the first state to ban employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, and it did so in 1982.  However, as of yet, it has not created equal legislation regarding gender identity.

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From M’Naghten to Hinckley to Clark: “The Incredible Shrinking Insanity Defense”

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. 

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The Second Amendment and the Public’s Health

Last November, Michael O’Hear offered an interesting post on whether a Seventh Circuit decision that developed a new test for Second Amendment claims would breath life into the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, 128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008), which for the first time interpreted the Second Amendment as conferring an individual right to possess and use firearms. Two years after Heller was handed down, I have been wondering about its consequences, too, in the context of public health policy.

Historically, gun-related violence and accidents were not viewed as a public health matter. Rather, gun violence was considered a matter for the criminal justice system; gun-related suicides were seen as a concern for the mental health system; and gun accidents were viewed as best handled by educational safety courses. Perceptions changed, however, with the advent of the field of injury prevention in the 1970s. When all gun violence and accidents were considered together, guns were found to be the second-leading cause of injury deaths in the U.S. 

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