{"id":10491,"date":"2010-06-18T08:44:38","date_gmt":"2010-06-18T13:44:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=10491"},"modified":"2010-06-18T08:47:39","modified_gmt":"2010-06-18T13:47:39","slug":"from-mnaghten-to-hinckley-to-clark-the-incredible-shrinking-insanity-defense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2010\/06\/from-mnaghten-to-hinckley-to-clark-the-incredible-shrinking-insanity-defense\/","title":{"rendered":"From M’Naghten to Hinckley to Clark: “The Incredible Shrinking Insanity Defense”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In 1843,\u00a0Daniel M’Naghten (left) killed the secretary of the\u00a0Prime Minister of England.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After a period of expansion in the mid-twentieth century,\u00a0the insanity defense has been progressively restricted since John Hinckley’s\u00a0successful\u00a0use of the defense during his trial on charges arising from his attempted assassination of President Reagan.\u00a0\u00a0Janie Kim<\/a>\u00a0now recounts the story of the “incredible shrinking insanity defense,” as she calls it, in a fascinating\u00a0new paper on SSRN<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She focuses particularly on the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in Clark v. Arizona<\/em>.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

The legislative backstory to Clark <\/em>parallels the aftermath of the Hinckley case.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Indeed, “Laura’s Law,”\u00a0along with subsequent\u00a0decisions by the state supreme court,\u00a0arguably made Arizona the toughest state in the nation on mentally ill criminal defendants.<\/p>\n

The inevitable constitutional challenge\u00a0came in the case of Eric Clark, a schizophrenic teenager convicted of first-degree murder for killing a police officer.\u00a0 Clark raised two issue in the U.S. Supreme Court.\u00a0 First, he argued that Arizona had violated the Due Process Clause by eliminating the so-called cognitive prong from the M’Naghten <\/em>insanity test.\u00a0In rejecting this challenge, the Court declined Clark’s implicit invitation to constitutionalize the insanity defense.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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<\/em> for first-degree murder.\u00a0 In rejecting this claim, the Court interpreted the\u00a0Arizona law narrowly to exclude only expert opinion<\/em> evidence and indicated that states may properly preclude the use of such evidence to negate mens rea<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Janie’s paper, entitled “The Story of Clark v. Arizona<\/em>: The Incredible Shrinking Insanity Defense,” appears as a chapter in Criminal Law Stories<\/em> (Weisberg & Coker, eds. 2010).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1843,\u00a0Daniel M’Naghten (left) killed the secretary of the\u00a0Prime Minister of England.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 After a period of expansion in the mid-twentieth century,\u00a0the insanity defense has been progressively […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,35,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criminal-justice","category-legal-scholarship","category-us-supreme-court","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}