Speaker 1: M March. It's morning. The weather is gray and rainy
Speaker 1: in the nation's capital, Washington, d C. And overweight, twenty
Speaker 1: five year old white man with straight brown hair sits
Speaker 1: down at a desk in Room three twelve of the
Speaker 1: Park Central Hotel. Near him are two suitcases that hold
Speaker 1: everything important to his life and mission. In one suitcase,
Speaker 1: there's a best Western RhoD Atlas, two pairs of underwear,
Speaker 1: some shirts, and some jeans. There are also magazine clippings
Speaker 1: and photographs of the woman he loves more than life itself.
Speaker 1: The woman in question, the teenage actress Jodie Foster, does
Speaker 1: not return that love. But that's okay. John Hinckley Jr.
Speaker 1: Has a plan. In the other suitcase, there's a twenty
Speaker 1: two caliber double action revolver in thirty seven rounds of ammunition.
Speaker 1: Hinkley calmly pulls out a blue pen and a yellow
Speaker 1: legal pad and sits before a big mirror overlooking the desk.
Speaker 1: Dear Jody, the letter begins, there is a definite probability
Speaker 1: that I will be killed. It's for this very reason
Speaker 1: that I'm writing you this letter. Now. There is a
Speaker 1: note of urgency to Hinckley's words. I will admit to
Speaker 1: you that the reason I'm going ahead with this attempt
Speaker 1: now is because I just cannot wait any longer to
Speaker 1: impress you. Hinkley has finally figured out how he can
Speaker 1: win the love and attention of Jodie Foster. He concludes, Jody,
Speaker 1: I'm asking you to please look into your heart at
Speaker 1: least give me the chance with this historical deed to
Speaker 1: gain your respect and love. I love you forever, John Hinckley.
Speaker 1: He folds the letter into thirds and stuffs it into
Speaker 1: an envelope labeled Jodie Foster. Then John Hinckley Jr. Reaches
Speaker 1: for his gun, places it in his coat pocket, and
Speaker 1: leaves his hotel to shoot the President of the United States.
Speaker 1: M Nothing, wind and water and sky. Dudy tell me
Speaker 1: I can I would swam motions, I would move out,
Speaker 1: since I would do anything, What do you want me
Speaker 1: to do? I'm Sean Braswell and welcome to the Thread.
Speaker 1: This season we look at some of history's most notorious
Speaker 1: criminal defendants who are linked by a common theme, the
Speaker 1: insanity defense. So what's our thread so far? In episode one,
Speaker 1: we covered the trial of the Aurora movie theater gunman
Speaker 1: James Holmes, Holmes was clearly mentally ill, but it was
Speaker 1: not enough for him to be found legally insane. One
Speaker 1: of the reasons that defendants like James Holmes have a
Speaker 1: tough time proving legal insanity today was the public outcry
Speaker 1: that followed earlier high profile cases cases like Lorraina Bobbitt's
Speaker 1: Bobbitt As We Saw An Episode two, was acquitted for
Speaker 1: cutting off the penis of her husband John, despite widespread
Speaker 1: public belief that she was guilty of a crime. But
Speaker 1: the case that really outraged the American public came a
Speaker 1: decade before the Bobbitt soap opera. John Hinckley Jr's attempted
Speaker 1: assassination of President Ronald Reagan rock the world, so did
Speaker 1: his later acquittal. Hinkley claimed he wanted to impress the
Speaker 1: actress Jodie Foster. He was obsessed with her. He later
Speaker 1: described his historic deed as the greatest love offering in
Speaker 1: the history of the world. Hinkley's lawyers claimed such thoughts
Speaker 1: were the product of a delusional mind, and the assassin's
Speaker 1: landmark trial would test the bounds of the insanity defense
Speaker 1: as never before. The initial news reports about the attempt
Speaker 1: on Ronald Reagan's life were murky ago. There were shots
Speaker 1: fired to justice. President Reagan e mercy from the Washington
Speaker 1: Elton Hotel today after delivering a speech, Reagan was rushed
Speaker 1: from the hotel to George Washington University Hospital. President Reagan
Speaker 1: walked into the hospital under his own power and is
Speaker 1: said to have been conversing with people inside the hospital.
Speaker 1: A few outside the hospital had any idea about the
Speaker 1: severity of his actual condition. The President had a life
Speaker 1: threatening gunshot wound. President Reagan is in surgery. He has
Speaker 1: been there since about four o'clock Eastern time. Doctors recordedly
Speaker 1: discovered that his left lung was partially collapsed and that
Speaker 1: there was blood in the chess cabinet. We're told that
Speaker 1: the President kept his sense of humor, that he was
Speaker 1: conscious on the way into the operating room, that he
Speaker 1: was accompanied also by his wife, Nancy Reagan, and the
Speaker 1: President is quoted as telling her, Honey, I guess I
Speaker 1: just forgot to duck. The man who shot Reagan was
Speaker 1: tackled at the scene taken into custody. The gunman of
Speaker 1: the alleged gunman, I guess I still have to keep saying,
Speaker 1: has been identified as one John W. Hinkley Jr. Who
Speaker 1: was twenty two years old from Evergreen, Colorado. Hinckley was
Speaker 1: barely remembered at Highland Park High School, where he graduated
Speaker 1: in nineteen Sunday three. His picture is in the yearbook,
Speaker 1: a neatly dressed young man, but teachers had trouble recalling
Speaker 1: anything about him. One classmate said he just sort of
Speaker 1: blended in. Hinckley was the son of a rich oil executive.
Speaker 1: This is Andrea Alden, author of Disorder in the Court,
Speaker 1: Morality Myth, and the Insanity Defense. He was fortunate to
Speaker 1: be the child of UM, a pretty wealthy family, so
Speaker 1: they had a lot of resources to care for him,
Speaker 1: and he spent a lot of time, um getting you know,
Speaker 1: being treated by psychiatrists, being on medication, et cetera. His
Speaker 1: troubles seemed to emerge, you know, in his teen years.
Speaker 1: Um he had trouble socially, he had trouble academically. He
Speaker 1: was kind of a loner. Still, Hinckley was not violent
Speaker 1: or aggressive with others. This is from an interview that
Speaker 1: his parents gave to reporter Barbara Walters. Why does he
Speaker 1: have a violent the genteralist out never any violence? Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, he didn't date, started dating girls and
Speaker 1: junior high in high school, and his what boyfriends he
Speaker 1: had did start dating girls. So he lost his boyfriends
Speaker 1: and and never acquired girlfriends. And he just withdrew into
Speaker 1: his room and started playing guitar and listening to Beatle
Speaker 1: records alone. And that was the way he spent a
Speaker 1: great deal of his time. In the late nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: Hinckley developed a new obsession. According to sources, John Hinckley Jr.
Speaker 1: The accused gunman, may have tried to kill Mr Reagan
Speaker 1: because of an infatuation with a young actress. He had
Speaker 1: a vivid fantasy life. This is Lincoln Kaplan, a senior
Speaker 1: research scholar at Eale Law School and author of The
Speaker 1: Insanity Defense and the Trial of John W. Hinckley Jr.
Speaker 1: He became obsessed with the movie Taxi Driver are made
Speaker 1: by Martin Scorsese in nineteen six and starring Robert de
Speaker 1: Niro and Jodie Foster. Taxi Driver was the disturbing story
Speaker 1: of Travis Bickle, a man who, after being spurned by
Speaker 1: a pretty woman, purchases an arsenal of weapons and plots
Speaker 1: the assassination of a US presidential candidate. Here's Robert de
Speaker 1: Niro as Bickle. Listen, you've screw heads. Here's a man
Speaker 1: who would not take it anymore, a man who stood
Speaker 1: up against the scum, the dogs, the filth. Here is
Speaker 1: someone who stood up. Hinckley saw the movie at least
Speaker 1: fifteen times. He began keeping a diary and buying guns, and,
Speaker 1: like the Travis Pickle character, Hinkley developed an unhealthy fixation
Speaker 1: with the film's pretty teenage prostitute played by Jodie Foster.
Speaker 1: Somehow the Hinckley delusions got kind of mashed up between
Speaker 1: the film and the reality, so he became deeply obsessed
Speaker 1: with the real life actor Jody Foster um and obsessed
Speaker 1: with establishing some sort of contact with her. Yesterday had
Speaker 1: emerged that Hinckley had written a lot of letters to
Speaker 1: the nineteen year old actress who starred in the movie
Speaker 1: Taxi Driver. Miss Foster, a freshman at Yale University, gave
Speaker 1: a press conference to discustance without getting specific. Was he
Speaker 1: threatening animals? What was he like? I'm allowed to say, Um,
Speaker 1: I believe that it's you know that the letters were
Speaker 1: assumed to have been, you know, love type of Hinkley
Speaker 1: went to New Haven, Connecticut, to try to find Foster
Speaker 1: at Yale. He summoned the courage to call her on
Speaker 1: the phone, and he recorded those conversations. They are halting,
Speaker 1: awkward and somewhat creepy. Oh no, no, you kid, Look,
Speaker 1: I really can ss youkay, but do me a really
Speaker 1: big favor. You understand why I can't, you know, carry
Speaker 1: on these conversations before. I don't know, you understand that dangerous?
Speaker 1: Just not fair. It's all right, peoplely responds, well, I'm
Speaker 1: not dangerous, but influenced by taxi driver, the spurned Hinckley
Speaker 1: was becoming dangerous Somehow. The connection between the film and
Speaker 1: the presidential candidate led him to decide that in order
Speaker 1: to get Jodie Foster's attention, he needed to assassinate the president.
Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the President of the United
Speaker 1: States in January. The former actor and governor of California
Speaker 1: did not get off to a good start. By March
Speaker 1: of that year, he had the lowest approval rating of
Speaker 1: any modern president at that early stage of his term.
Speaker 1: That was about to change. One of the items on
Speaker 1: the president's schedule on that fateful morning of March was
Speaker 1: a speech to a trade union group at the Washington
Speaker 1: Hilton Hotel. You and your forebears built our nation, now
Speaker 1: please help us rebuild it. The day before Reagan speech,
Speaker 1: John Hinckley was out walking the streets of Washington, d c.
Speaker 1: He had stopped at the nation's capital on his way
Speaker 1: up to Yale, where he planned to end his own life.
Speaker 1: That day, he stopped by a McDonald's and ate an
Speaker 1: egg McMuffin. On the way back to his hotel, he
Speaker 1: picked up a newspaper in the Washington Star, which was
Speaker 1: then a newspaper in in in the capital, he saw
Speaker 1: the president's schedule. It said the president would be at
Speaker 1: the Washington Hilton at two pm to deliver a speech.
Speaker 1: Hinckley fantasized about another way of committing suicide, one that
Speaker 1: could draw a lot more attention to himself, and he
Speaker 1: developed that plan that this this, this was the way
Speaker 1: he resolved his uncertainty about the best way to to
Speaker 1: gain the fame that he sought to get Jodie Foster's attention.
Speaker 1: Hinkley returned to his hotel and started to make plans.
Speaker 1: As it happens, one of the books he brought with
Speaker 1: him on his trip and read intensely was The Catcher
Speaker 1: in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. Four months earlier,
Speaker 1: Hinkley's favorite musician, the former Beatle John Lennon, was gunned
Speaker 1: down in front of his New York City apartment building.
Speaker 1: Those of you who listened to Season one of The
Speaker 1: Thread will recall that The Catcher in the Rye was
Speaker 1: also the book that Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman, was
Speaker 1: reading at the crime scene when he was apprehended by police.
Speaker 1: Binkley loaded his gun, a small revolver in his hotel room.
Speaker 1: He stashed it in the right pocket of his jacket
Speaker 1: and placed a John Lennon pin into another pocket. Hinkley
Speaker 1: left his hotel and hailed a cab to take him
Speaker 1: to the Hilton. He, like Chapman, was about to leave
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Speaker 1: Outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington, Hinkley calmly waited behind
Speaker 1: a rope line with other onlookers and members of the press. Finally,
Speaker 1: Reagan and his entourage emerged from the hotel. When Reagan
Speaker 1: came out of the Hilton after giving his speech, Hinkley
Speaker 1: waited until, with a few steps, he was in range
Speaker 1: of of being able to hit Reagan. Several news cameras
Speaker 1: captured what happened next. Reagan was pushed inside the back
Speaker 1: seat of the limousine and the motorcade sped away in
Speaker 1: a matter of seconds. However, Hinkley had fired six shots,
Speaker 1: emptying the gun cylinder. Three men, including Reagan's press secretary
Speaker 1: James Brady, lay wounded on the sidewalk, and a fourth,
Speaker 1: the President, was also hit. The bullet that struck Reagan.
Speaker 1: Hinckley's fifth shot ricocheted off the right rear quarter panel
Speaker 1: of the limousine and flew through the small gap between
Speaker 1: the car's door and its frame, hit the President in
Speaker 1: his left side. John Heackley hoped he would be killed
Speaker 1: at the scene of the crime. Instead, he was tackled,
Speaker 1: forced to the ground, and taken into custody. Like James Holmes,
Speaker 1: who killed twelve people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado,
Speaker 1: in Heackley would live to go on trial, and like Holmes,
Speaker 1: he had accomplished his mission instantly. Heinckley achieved what he
Speaker 1: had he had sought to, which was fame in an
Speaker 1: effort to get Jodie Foster's attention. And when he was
Speaker 1: asked about this by a psychiatrist after his assassination attempt
Speaker 1: and before his trial the following year, whether he succeeded,
Speaker 1: and he said yes, he achieved everything that he wanted.
Speaker 1: Of course, accomplishing what you set out to do is
Speaker 1: not a strong legal defense to the attempted murder of
Speaker 1: a sitting president, and so John Hinckley's trial would turn
Speaker 1: on another defense, whether he should be considered not guilty
Speaker 1: by reason of insanity. John Hinckley Jr. Was charged with
Speaker 1: thirteen crimes. His trial in n two focused mostly on
Speaker 1: whether Hinckley was legally insane when he shot the president.
Speaker 1: The prosecutors, just like the ones in the James Holmes case,
Speaker 1: spelled out the calculated steps Hinckley took to carry out
Speaker 1: his mission Lincoln Kaplan. Again. The government uh called Hinckley
Speaker 1: a hunter and a stalker, and its account of his movements,
Speaker 1: especially in the six months before he shot President Reagan,
Speaker 1: emphasized his deliberate purchasing of guns and ammunition, in particular
Speaker 1: a kind of bullet called a devastator because it had
Speaker 1: an exploding head. Hinkley had been buying guns since nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine. He spent hours learning to use them on
Speaker 1: local firing ranges. It was not even the first time
Speaker 1: he had stalked in the American president. Less than a
Speaker 1: year before, during the nineteen eighty presidential campaign, Hinkley attended
Speaker 1: campaign rallies for Jimmy Carter, Reagan's predecessor in office. He
Speaker 1: got within an arm's reach of Carter, but it was
Speaker 1: just a test run. He was not yet ready to
Speaker 1: pull the trigger. Such actions and hesitations, however, helped bolster
Speaker 1: the case that Hinkley knew what he was doing, and
Speaker 1: more than that, knew the difference between right and wrong.
Speaker 1: Andrew Alden and the prosecution said he clearly knew what
Speaker 1: he was doing was wrong, which was evidenced by the
Speaker 1: fact that it took him months to get up the
Speaker 1: nerve to go through with it. Um evidence that he
Speaker 1: did things like conceal his weapons when he traveled, which
Speaker 1: indicated that he had some awareness that there was an
Speaker 1: illegal component to his actions, and so essentially what the
Speaker 1: prosecution wanted to say, as he clearly knew right from wrong,
Speaker 1: Therefore he is not legally insane. The prosecution called a
Speaker 1: series of witnesses and experts to argue that Hinckley was
Speaker 1: not delusional, he was just a fame seeking narcissist. Richard
Speaker 1: Bonnie is a professor of law in medicine at the
Speaker 1: University of Virginia. He was a troubled young man. Um.
Speaker 1: But the core diagnosis and the core set of motivations
Speaker 1: that were described, you know, by the prosecution witnesses basically
Speaker 1: had to do with, uh, wanting to be famous. Uh,
Speaker 1: and that he felt like a fifth wheel in his family. Uh.
Speaker 1: He felt like he was a failure. Hinckley was well
Speaker 1: aware of the reality of his situation. According to prosecutors,
Speaker 1: he fully appreciated the wrongfulness, you know, of what he
Speaker 1: was doing. It's just that it didn't matter, you know,
Speaker 1: as much to him as you know, his motivations for
Speaker 1: being famous. Hinckley's defense attorneys painted a different picture of
Speaker 1: his state of mind. The defense of you was that
Speaker 1: he was delusional. Uh, and there was this delusional belief
Speaker 1: that he had that in some way, h if he
Speaker 1: were to shoot the President Uh that there would end
Speaker 1: up he could, he would commit suicide and there would
Speaker 1: then be some magical union between him and Jodie Foster.
Speaker 1: Increased fixation with Jodie Foster, they suggested, was an obsession,
Speaker 1: and his failure to build a relationship with her over
Speaker 1: the preceding year had devastated him. He started to take antidepressants,
Speaker 1: His writing turned dark and suicidal. He continued to try
Speaker 1: to visit Foster at Yale. In one desperate letter he
Speaker 1: left at her door, he scribbled quote, Jodie, goodbye, I
Speaker 1: love you six trillion times. Don't you maybe like me
Speaker 1: just a little bit? Lincoln Kaplan again. The chronicle that
Speaker 1: the defense put on about all of his movements in
Speaker 1: the in the previous six months Uh left a kind
Speaker 1: of creepy, oppressive sense in the courtroom that strongly reinforced
Speaker 1: the narrative as the defense was was putting it forward.
Speaker 1: Hinckley's mental state before the shooting was one of despair
Speaker 1: and depression. According to one of the defense teams psychiatric experts,
Speaker 1: Dr William Carpenter, suicide was at the forefront of his mind,
Speaker 1: but so was his obsession with Jodie Foster. Richard Bonnie. Again,
Speaker 1: according to the the defense account, he was so detached
Speaker 1: from reality and so drawn into his inner world that
Speaker 1: the enormity of what he was doing, attempting to assassinate
Speaker 1: the president of the United States, didn't have the emotional connection, because,
Speaker 1: as you know Dr carpent Or put it, you know,
Speaker 1: the president was just a bit player in this drama
Speaker 1: that was being you know, played out in Hinckley's mind.
Speaker 1: As the trial went on, lawyers told the jury to
Speaker 1: competing but very compelling stories about John Hinckley. It was
Speaker 1: a really great example of the adversarial legal system Andrea
Speaker 1: Alden again, because we have, you know, the prosecution and
Speaker 1: the defense taking these a that same facts and spending
Speaker 1: a wildly different tale. Um. So, for example, justin his
Speaker 1: defense attorneys talking about how clearly his fixation with Jodie
Speaker 1: Foster was a delusion that was spurred by mental illness.
Speaker 1: You had the prosecutors saying, uh no, it's just a
Speaker 1: normal crush, He's just a dreamer. The stakes were high
Speaker 1: in the Hinkley case. Obviously a president had been shot.
Speaker 1: Both sides put forth an extraordinary amount of evidence about
Speaker 1: what was happening in Hinckley's mind at the moment he
Speaker 1: pulled the trigger, and as a result, the trial is
Speaker 1: a great case study about the insanity defense and its
Speaker 1: potential pitfalls. Richard Bonnie again now with Hinckley. The thing
Speaker 1: that makes this case so interesting is that um the
Speaker 1: experts fundamentally disagreed about what was the matter with Hinckley
Speaker 1: and about the diagnosis. That disagreement meant that John Hinckley
Speaker 1: was not the only one on trial in the summer
Speaker 1: of the insanity defense itself was on trial. Up next,
Speaker 1: the surprising verdict in the Hinkley case and the ripples
Speaker 1: that that verdict continues to have on the law and
Speaker 1: on society. Tired of standing idly by while the world
Speaker 1: goes crazy, Diane Lockhart is, and so is the cast
Speaker 1: of the critically acclaimed legal drama The Good Fight. Joined
Speaker 1: the Fight by watching the new season, now streaming exclusively
Speaker 1: on CBS All Access. Tune in to see if Diane
Speaker 1: Lockhart will lead the resistance in a new, post factual world,
Speaker 1: a world where the lawyers with the best stories triumph
Speaker 1: over the lawyers with the best facts. Season three of
Speaker 1: The Good Fight throws the standard playbook out the window.
Speaker 1: New characters, new ripped from the news storylines in a
Speaker 1: dynamic cast that is more stacked than ever. Christine Baranski
Speaker 1: is back, is the venerable Diane Lockhart, Rose, Leslie Cush, Jumbo,
Speaker 1: and Andrew McDonald's characters challenged the patriarchy at every turn.
Speaker 1: Well actor Michael Sheen shakes up the screen as infamous
Speaker 1: lawyer Roland Blum a k a. Corruption Incarnate. You won't
Speaker 1: want to miss season three of The Good Fight. The
Speaker 1: Resistance starts. Now Join the fight by heading on over
Speaker 1: to CBS dot com slash thread to redeem your free
Speaker 1: trial of CBS all Access to watch the new season
Speaker 1: of The Good Fight, now streaming exclusively on CBS All Access.
Speaker 1: That CBS dot com slash thread to redeem your free
Speaker 1: trial of CBS All Access. The insanity defense is a
Speaker 1: legal construct, but as we have seen in this season already,
Speaker 1: our understanding of a defendants mental state always depends on
Speaker 1: our broader scientific understanding of mental illness in psychiatric disorders,
Speaker 1: and of course this understanding changes over time as we
Speaker 1: learn more about how the human brain works. The Hinkley
Speaker 1: case happened to come at a pivotal moment in the
Speaker 1: history of the psychiatric profession Andrea Alden. Around the early
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, psychiatry as a discipline kind of underwent a
Speaker 1: major reformation UM which is now referred to as the
Speaker 1: biomedical turn, And basically it was a huge effort to
Speaker 1: science size the discipline UM, trying to move it away
Speaker 1: from Freudian talk, therapy and psychoanalysis into something that is medical.
Speaker 1: Thanks to modern science, we were learning more and more
Speaker 1: about how mental illness stems from organic brain dysfunction and
Speaker 1: not bad morals. So at that time that Hinkley was tried,
Speaker 1: psychiatry was kind of undergoing this massive revolution and really
Speaker 1: changing the trying to change the way people thought about
Speaker 1: mental illness. But at the time we were really thinking
Speaker 1: of mental illness as a medical biological disorder and not um,
Speaker 1: you know, something abstract located in like the mind or
Speaker 1: the soul, something that we couldn't actually, you know, put
Speaker 1: a finger on and find a medicine for. Just because
Speaker 1: something is biological, however, does not make it easy to identify,
Speaker 1: especially after the fact. How can you ever know what
Speaker 1: somebody knows? Right? We couldn't go back in time and
Speaker 1: be there with him inside his brain at the time
Speaker 1: that he was pulling the trigger. So it's asking us
Speaker 1: to make a determination about something that's completely unknowable um
Speaker 1: and that does not fit at all with what we
Speaker 1: understand about mental illness and how it works. Now. The
Speaker 1: insanity defense relies on experts and evidence, witnesses and writings.
Speaker 1: It hinges on a fundamental sense of optimism that we
Speaker 1: can determine in a court of law, whether the accused
Speaker 1: acted with sufficient criminal intent, whether they knew right from wrong. Sometimes,
Speaker 1: as Ahinkly case revealed, this optimism is itself somewhat delusional.
Speaker 1: And there's one particular exchange where I love that the
Speaker 1: prosecution is cross examined and he said, he kept asking him,
Speaker 1: so you observed delusions in Mr Hinckley, and the psychiatrist
Speaker 1: just trying to explain you cannot observe somebody's delusion, and
Speaker 1: he says something along the lines of you can no
Speaker 1: longer see whether someone is delusional as you can see
Speaker 1: whether or not they believe in God. Right. Ultimately, the
Speaker 1: decision about what was going on in the defendant's mind
Speaker 1: comes down to the jury, and the jury in the
Speaker 1: Hinckley case delivered a verdict that shocked many across the country.
Speaker 1: John W. Hinkley Jr. Has been found not guilty by
Speaker 1: reason of insanity on all thirteen counts. This was a
Speaker 1: case in which there was much evidence in Hinckley's own hand,
Speaker 1: in his writings and his poetry and his essays, to
Speaker 1: suggest that he was in fact degenerating into a psychotic
Speaker 1: killer by the time March rolled around. Richard Bonnie again,
Speaker 1: if you accept the defense diagnosis of what was the
Speaker 1: matter with Hinckley, that he was progressively detached from reality,
Speaker 1: then I think the verdict is actually defensible. The jury
Speaker 1: themselves clearly seemed to accept the more nuanced version of
Speaker 1: what led John Hinckley to commit his crime. However, the
Speaker 1: public was much less sympathetic. There was a massive public outcry.
Speaker 1: Hinckley was sentenced to St. Elizabeth's, the psychiatric hospital in Washington,
Speaker 1: where he would remain for the next thirty four years.
Speaker 1: He was sixty one years old when a federal judge
Speaker 1: determined in he was no longer a threat to himself
Speaker 1: for others. Starting in August, John Hinckley Jr. Will be
Speaker 1: allowed to leave St. Elizabeth's Hospital here in the Washington
Speaker 1: suburbs for good and live with his mother in Williamsburg
Speaker 1: full time. The real legacy of Hinckley's trial came in
Speaker 1: the legal reforms that followed after his acquittal. There were
Speaker 1: widespread calls for the abolishment of insanity plea laws Lincoln
Speaker 1: Kaplan again, and there were congressional hearings about the insanity
Speaker 1: defense and then uh reconsiderations around the country, And that
Speaker 1: short of it was that uh in in the half
Speaker 1: decade after the Inkley trial, uh the insanity defense was
Speaker 1: reformed in thirty eight states, and it was basically narrowed
Speaker 1: in quite a substantial way. Four states completely abolished the defense.
Speaker 1: So a lot of courts went back too, took the
Speaker 1: less complicated and um more expansive standards, and went back
Speaker 1: to the very restrictive standards. So in that sense, I
Speaker 1: think taking us away from, you know, two centuries of
Speaker 1: progress in trying to get the law to be a
Speaker 1: little more nuanced in its conception of what constitutes um
Speaker 1: a legal excuse based on severe mental illness, and pushing
Speaker 1: us back to where we were in eighteen forty three.
Speaker 1: That's right, eighteen forty three, the middle of the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: We'll get to eighteen forty three later this season, but
Speaker 1: first we need to understand more about why the Hinckley
Speaker 1: verdict was so unthinkable given the twentieth century context. The
Speaker 1: American public was not always so averse to the insanity defense,
Speaker 1: and it was used to excuse the conduct of those
Speaker 1: who committed heinous acts, crimes far worse than the one
Speaker 1: that LORRAINA. Bobbitt was acquitted for in the nineteen nineties. Indeed,
Speaker 1: the entire idea of temporary insanity appeared somewhat justifiable and
Speaker 1: even publicly sanctioned, provided that the crime had been committed
Speaker 1: by one with a socially acceptable reason for being out
Speaker 1: of his or her mind. Next on the thread the
Speaker 1: story of a high society love triangle and a jealous
Speaker 1: husband who took matters into his own hands to dispose
Speaker 1: of his wife's former lover. In the early years of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, New York was enjoying an unprecedented period
Speaker 1: of economic growth and power, but it was also a
Speaker 1: time of corruption, pleasure, and murder. People thought that the
Speaker 1: gunshots were part of the show. At first. Seventy years
Speaker 1: before John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan, millions of Americans tuned
Speaker 1: in for what was billed as the trial of the century.
Speaker 1: But he said to his attorney's no way, I'm perfectly
Speaker 1: saying I did. I did the act, and in fact
Speaker 1: I should have been given a medal. A millionaire businessman
Speaker 1: shoots and kills another one at point blank range before
Speaker 1: hundreds of witnesses on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden.
Speaker 1: That seems like an open and shut murder case. But
Speaker 1: almost nothing was as it seemed in the privileged circles
Speaker 1: of early twentieth century New York. And if you had
Speaker 1: enough money and the right connections, even the criminal law
Speaker 1: could be bent to your advantage. I am nothing, Wind
Speaker 1: and water and sky duty tell I can I would motions,
Speaker 1: I would move out, I would do what do you
Speaker 1: want me to do? The Thread is produced by Robert Coulos,
Speaker 1: Sophia Perpetua and me Sean Braswell. Chris Hoff engineered our show.
Speaker 1: This episode features Pepper, Jill and Jack performing the song
Speaker 1: Unworthy of Your Love by Stephen Sondheim. To learn more
Speaker 1: about The Thread, visit AUSI dot com, slash the Thread
Speaker 1: all one word, and make sure to subscribe to The
Speaker 1: Thread on Apple podcast, follow us on I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Check us out
Speaker 1: at ausi dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. If
Speaker 1: you love surprising, engaging stories from history, look no further
Speaker 1: than the flashback section of ausi dot com. That's o
Speaker 1: z Y dot com went Demland, God, Charlie, take my
Speaker 1: blood and my body for your love. Let me feel
Speaker 1: than you're Let me drink toison down.