Speaker 1: What makes a person legally insane? Can you know the
Speaker 1: difference between right and wrong and still be considered insane?
Speaker 1: These are some of the questions we've considered this season
Speaker 1: on the Thread exploring the insanity defense, But there are
Speaker 1: still others, like how can the law keep up with
Speaker 1: what we are learning from science about the human brain?
Speaker 1: Can any of us really control our actions? And what
Speaker 1: should we do about those of us who cannot. In July,
Speaker 1: a graduate student named James Holmes walked through the doors
Speaker 1: of the Century sixteen movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Witnesses
Speaker 1: say Holmes fired into the air and then started shooting
Speaker 1: into the crowd. Holmes killed twelve people and injured fifty
Speaker 1: eight others. He thought the killings would boost his own
Speaker 1: quote human capital. He called this his mission, and the
Speaker 1: mission was to kill as many people as possible. Holmes
Speaker 1: pled not guilty by reason of insanity at his trial.
Speaker 1: As we heard an episode one this season, there will
Speaker 1: be no doubt in your minds by the end of
Speaker 1: this trial that Mr Holmes is severely mentally ill. None
Speaker 1: Holmes was mentally ill, but a Colorado jury did not
Speaker 1: think he was insane under the law. After listening to
Speaker 1: witnesses and psychiatric experts, they decided Holmes knew the difference
Speaker 1: between right and wrong at the time he committed the crime,
Speaker 1: the standard for legal insanity in Colorado and many other states.
Speaker 1: How in the world can someone who kills twelve people
Speaker 1: and injures another fifty eight and leaves a terrible tragedy
Speaker 1: in a theater at midnight? How in the world can
Speaker 1: that person be viewed as sane in any reasonable sense.
Speaker 1: Holmes was found guilty, just like the vast majority of
Speaker 1: criminal defendants today who invoke the insanity defense. To understand
Speaker 1: why requires a journey through history. The conviction of James
Speaker 1: Holmes really begins almost two centuries ago in England. At
Speaker 1: the time, Queen Victoria and the British House of Lords
Speaker 1: could not have imagined a crime like the one committed
Speaker 1: by Holmes, But if you look close enough, their fingerprints
Speaker 1: are all over his fate. I'm Sean Braswell. Each season
Speaker 1: on The Thread, we unravel the stories behind some of
Speaker 1: the most important lives and events in history to discover,
Speaker 1: essentially how one thing leads to another. This season, we've
Speaker 1: explored the crazy history of perhaps the most controversial defense
Speaker 1: in the criminal law not guilty by way of insanity.
Speaker 1: From James Holmes to Lorraine of Bobbitt to John Hinckley Jr.
Speaker 1: Some of history's most notorious criminal defendants are linked by
Speaker 1: this common thread. In the last episode, we heard about
Speaker 1: the first use of the temporary insanity defense in American law,
Speaker 1: the case of Daniel Sickles. He was the New York
Speaker 1: congressman who murdered Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key,
Speaker 1: just yards from the White House in eighteen fifty nine.
Speaker 1: I mean literally, if it was an episode of House
Speaker 1: of Cards, you wouldn't believe it, right, but it really happened.
Speaker 1: You know, There's really nothing like it in American political history.
Speaker 1: Sickle's legal dream team relied on an older case from
Speaker 1: another country in order to save the congressman from being hanged.
Speaker 1: In this episode, we will finish this season's thread with
Speaker 1: that case in England, where the modern insanity defense really began.
Speaker 1: We'll also dive into whether the insanity defense really makes sense,
Speaker 1: especially in light of what we know about mental illness
Speaker 1: in the human brain. Today. We'll learn how the defense
Speaker 1: sits uncomfortably at the intersection of law and human psychology,
Speaker 1: how it challenges lawyers, judges, and juries in their pursuit
Speaker 1: of justice, and how it speaks to things that all
Speaker 1: of us hold dear, such as moral responsibility, free will,
Speaker 1: even our own sanity. Our story this season really begins
Speaker 1: in England in the nineteenth century. There are actually two
Speaker 1: English cases that ushered in today's insanity defense. Both were
Speaker 1: attempts to murder a British leader. The first was in
Speaker 1: May of eighteen hundred, when a former soldier tried to
Speaker 1: kill King George. The third, Andrea Alden, is the author
Speaker 1: of Disorder in the Court, Morality Myth and the Insanity Defense.
Speaker 1: James Hadfield was a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. He
Speaker 1: received some sort of head injury that was documented. At
Speaker 1: the time. We didn't have the words traumatic brain injury,
Speaker 1: but that's basically what it was. Hadfield received eight blows
Speaker 1: to the head from a saber while fighting for his country.
Speaker 1: It was widely acknowledged that he came back from the
Speaker 1: war not the same person that he went um. Clearly
Speaker 1: what he had been through affected him and affected his
Speaker 1: personality and his behavior. Hadfield was convinced that the Second
Speaker 1: Coming of Jesus Christ depend into upon his own death
Speaker 1: that he himself needed to be killed in order to
Speaker 1: fulfill a sacred prophecy. So his plan was to attempt
Speaker 1: to assassinate the king with the hopes that he would
Speaker 1: in the process be killed by people trying to defend
Speaker 1: the king, and then he could fulfill this prophecy somehow.
Speaker 1: And so is King George the Third in his royal
Speaker 1: entourage entered a theater in London on May hundred, Hadfield
Speaker 1: fired a pistol at the monarch. The shots missed. The King.
Speaker 1: Hadfield was apprehended and charged with high treason, but the
Speaker 1: serious nature of Hadfield's crime meant he received a top
Speaker 1: notch legal defender. He had what was really the first
Speaker 1: kind of star defense attorney in a notable insanity defense trial,
Speaker 1: who was Thomas Erskine Um, who really kind of set
Speaker 1: the bar for making arguments about the legal standards for
Speaker 1: insanity that kind of changed the game going forward. Thomas
Speaker 1: erskine was the son of an English lord and the the
Speaker 1: most sought after criminal defense lawyer of his air. But
Speaker 1: at the time, the causes of mental illness, including the
Speaker 1: delusions experienced by James Hadfield we're not well understood. So
Speaker 1: at this point we still are looking at conceptions of
Speaker 1: mental illness as something either animal like or childlike, where
Speaker 1: the criminal either had the lack of ability to understand
Speaker 1: the nature of his or her actions UM, and that
Speaker 1: some of the judges would say either they had no
Speaker 1: more understanding than a wild beast or than a child.
Speaker 1: In other words, to be insane in nineteenth century England,
Speaker 1: make you a raving mad or infantile. Hadfield's lawyer Thomas Erskine,
Speaker 1: set out to change that. He felt that the concept
Speaker 1: of having no more understanding than a child or a
Speaker 1: wild beast was UM far too narrow of a construction
Speaker 1: of what mental illness as it pertains to criminal justice
Speaker 1: UM looked like, so he argued that it needed to
Speaker 1: be expanded to encompass more and their experiences. At trial,
Speaker 1: Erskine argued that Hadfield was insane not because he acted
Speaker 1: like a child or a wild beast, but because he
Speaker 1: was delusional at the time of the shooting he lost
Speaker 1: touch with the world around him as a result of
Speaker 1: his head injuries. To make his case, Erskine called twenty
Speaker 1: witnesses to the stand in a trial that took just
Speaker 1: six hours. These included doctors who claimed Hadfield's actions were
Speaker 1: the result of his brain injury. Hadfield was found to
Speaker 1: be insane and not guilty of treason. Thanks to Erskine's
Speaker 1: landmark defense, Hadfield was spared execution. Instead, he was ordered
Speaker 1: to spend the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital.
Speaker 1: The Hadfield incident could have been a small footnote in history.
Speaker 1: The King wasn't harmed after all. Instead, it laid the
Speaker 1: groundwork for an even bigger insanity case in England four
Speaker 1: decades later, one that still governs how many insanity cases
Speaker 1: play out today. Daniel McNaughton was a lowly Scottish woodcutter,
Speaker 1: someone whose name would you usually be lost to the
Speaker 1: sands of history. Instead, his name is familiar to most
Speaker 1: lawyers and law students today, and it's synonymous with the
Speaker 1: insanity defense. And here's why. The story begins. When McNaughton
Speaker 1: decides to murder a British leader, even though the person
Speaker 1: he shot wasn't his intended target. McNaughton um shot a
Speaker 1: man named Edward Drummond in the middle of the street
Speaker 1: in London the middle of the day, just walked up
Speaker 1: behind him and shot him. So it turned out that
Speaker 1: McNaughton believed he was shooting the Prime Minister at the time,
Speaker 1: and Edward Drummond was actually his private secretary. McNaughton claimed
Speaker 1: that the Prime Minister and his political party were persecuting him.
Speaker 1: We would probably recognize Mr McNaughton as suffering from something
Speaker 1: like paranoid schizophrenia if we were to get him in
Speaker 1: the care of a psychiatrist today, but unfortunately at the
Speaker 1: time we didn't quite understand what that meant. Edward Drummond
Speaker 1: died from his wounds and McNaughton was charged with murder.
Speaker 1: His trial began six weeks later in London before a
Speaker 1: large crowd of spec taters, including the famous writer Charles Dickens.
Speaker 1: McNaughton's attorney followed Thomas Erskine's defense of James Hadfield from
Speaker 1: four decades earlier. He argued his client was insane at
Speaker 1: the time of the shooting and therefore did not have
Speaker 1: the necessary criminal intent to be found guilty. He called
Speaker 1: a medical expert who examined McNaughton and testified quote the
Speaker 1: defendants moral faculties were impaired by extraordinary delusion. The defense worked,
Speaker 1: and in fact, the jury never even retired to deliberate.
Speaker 1: They just huddled together in the jury box and came
Speaker 1: up with the decision that he could be found not
Speaker 1: guilty by reason of insanity. The British public and press
Speaker 1: were outraged. Essentially, the public felt that he had gotten
Speaker 1: away with it, um, that he had feigned insanity um,
Speaker 1: and also that he was somehow um getting off scot free.
Speaker 1: And somebody else was not too pleased with the jury's verdict.
Speaker 1: Queen Victoria at the time had been had recently been
Speaker 1: the victim of an assassination attempt by somebody who also
Speaker 1: pled insanity, so she was creating pissed about the whole thing.
Speaker 1: A few years earlier, a deranged eighteen year old man
Speaker 1: had taken a shot at the pregnant Queen just outside
Speaker 1: Buckingham Palace. He, like McNaughton, had been found not guilty
Speaker 1: on grounds of insanity. After the McNaughton verdict, the Queen
Speaker 1: reportedly asked, how could you have been found not guilty?
Speaker 1: He did it, didn't he? She demanded, actually that the
Speaker 1: House of Lords come together and put together some more
Speaker 1: firm standards regarding mentally ill criminal defendants, which had not
Speaker 1: previously existed. What the House of Lords came back with
Speaker 1: is what is still known to this day by lawyers
Speaker 1: as the McNaughton rules, well ultimately emerged from McNaughton is
Speaker 1: still really the foundation of every insanity defense UM standard
Speaker 1: you will see today. At the time of the crime,
Speaker 1: the accused has to be suffering from a mental disease
Speaker 1: or defect that prevents him from knowing the difference between
Speaker 1: right and wrong. The McNaughton rules put a major legal
Speaker 1: stake into the ground in eighteen forty three when it
Speaker 1: came to whether defendant could be considered too insane to
Speaker 1: be convicted of a crime. So, over the years from
Speaker 1: the time that the mcdatin rules were established, UM, with
Speaker 1: every new iteration of the defense, it seemed to broaden
Speaker 1: slightly UM And as we learned more about mental illness,
Speaker 1: we started to try to expand the legal definitions to
Speaker 1: be more compatible with that. You can see the trickle
Speaker 1: down effect of that McNaughton case in later insanity defenses
Speaker 1: that allowed for broader interpretations of the law. Take for example,
Speaker 1: the story of Dan Sickles from episode five. The New
Speaker 1: York Congressman murdered a U. S attorney near the White
Speaker 1: House in eighteen fifty nine, but the aggrieved husband was
Speaker 1: found not guilty because of the temporary insanity, the first
Speaker 1: successful invocation of that defense in American history. And then
Speaker 1: in episode four, we told the story of Pittsburgh millionaire
Speaker 1: Harry Thaw, who killed the famous architects Stanford White because
Speaker 1: White sexually assaulted Thaw's wife. Harry Thaw, like Dan Sickles,
Speaker 1: was acquitted because a jury decided he was temporarily insane
Speaker 1: at the time of the kill. Then decades later, in nine,
Speaker 1: a delusional twenty five year old loaner named John Hinckley Jr.
Speaker 1: Fired six shots at the President of the United States.
Speaker 1: Hinckley's acquittal, as we saw an episode three, resulted in
Speaker 1: a backlash against the insanity defense, and the laws in
Speaker 1: several states retreated back to a narrower standard for insanity.
Speaker 1: Back to McNaughton Andrea Alden, but ultimately, after Hinkley, it
Speaker 1: felt like we kind of sling shotted back. Um. So
Speaker 1: ultimately what we came back to was the only one
Speaker 1: we're really comfortable with was, you know, did they know
Speaker 1: right from wrong at the time that they committed the act?
Speaker 1: So here we are on seventy six years after the
Speaker 1: case of Daniel McNaughton, and its outcome continues to influence
Speaker 1: how many insanity cases play out today. Up next modern
Speaker 1: brain science and how it could shape future insanity defenses.
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Speaker 1: listen for a change. Insanity claims are rare these days.
Speaker 1: They are used in less than one percent of all
Speaker 1: criminal cases, according to one study, and likely for good reason.
Speaker 1: Richard Bonnie is a professor of law into Medicine at
Speaker 1: the University of Virginia. The insanity defense is always an
Speaker 1: uphill battle for the defense because all of us are
Speaker 1: naturally skeptical about insanity claims. It can be hard for
Speaker 1: a jury to put aside the horrific nature of a
Speaker 1: criminal act in order to determine whether the accused was insane.
Speaker 1: At the time, many consider the insanity defense away for
Speaker 1: criminals to escape justice. Attitudes about the defense began to
Speaker 1: change in the nineteen eighties after John Hinckley was acquitted
Speaker 1: of shooting President Reagan almost nine out of ten Americans
Speaker 1: polled felt the insanity defense was a loophole for guilty
Speaker 1: persons trying to escape punishment. Four states also abolished the
Speaker 1: insanity defense, and the law in one of those states, Kansas,
Speaker 1: will be considered by the U. S. Supreme Court in
Speaker 1: October after a challenge from a convicted murderer named Craig Kaylor.
Speaker 1: Back in two thousand nine, a Kansas judge slapped the
Speaker 1: death sentence on Craig Kaylor for the murders of four
Speaker 1: of his family members. Kaylor claimed he'd sunk into deep
Speaker 1: depression after his marriage collapsed, a condition that led to
Speaker 1: him losing touch with reality. Now, the convicted murderer who
Speaker 1: did not have the option to use an insanity defense
Speaker 1: gets to make his case to the nation's highest court.
Speaker 1: But even where insanity cases can be presented, it's not
Speaker 1: easy to win them. Richard Bonnie Again, most insanity claims,
Speaker 1: when they are litigated fail. We put tremendous weight on
Speaker 1: the skill with which the defense is presented, and it's
Speaker 1: still hard to show the accused and not know the
Speaker 1: difference between right and wrong, even for those with clear
Speaker 1: mental illnesses like James Holmes. But just knowing right from
Speaker 1: wrong is not sufficient, says Bonnie. It doesn't capture what's
Speaker 1: really governing a defendants behavior. The dominant influence on what
Speaker 1: they are doing is the psychotic process. And that's why
Speaker 1: we would say the person is not terrible, you know,
Speaker 1: by their knowledge of the law, because now they're being
Speaker 1: you know, driven, not by their recognition of the law
Speaker 1: at all. Bonnie argues, there's a better question to ask
Speaker 1: to get at legal insanity, the question being does the
Speaker 1: person really appreciate um, uh, you know, in an emotional sense, uh,
Speaker 1: the moral enormity or the moral significance of what they
Speaker 1: are doing, or has their delusional belief deprived them, you know,
Speaker 1: of the capacity to do that, And that's the key question.
Speaker 1: The basis of criminal law is the premise that individual
Speaker 1: humans have some measure of free will. We are rational,
Speaker 1: self aware actors. We can control our choices in our
Speaker 1: actions and be held responsible for them when they violate
Speaker 1: social norms. On the other hand, the study of psychiatry
Speaker 1: and serious psychiatric disorders often focus on treating the ailments
Speaker 1: that prevent people from exercising choice or from controlling their actions.
Speaker 1: So if we're talking about retribution and deterrence on one hand,
Speaker 1: and treatment and basically nurturing on the other. They don't
Speaker 1: really work together very well Andrea Olden again, And so
Speaker 1: the language and the concepts used by a psychiatrist don't
Speaker 1: map neatly onto the goals of the criminal justice system.
Speaker 1: So it's very hard for those two systems to communicate
Speaker 1: within one another. And what it has amounted to over
Speaker 1: the years as kind of a territory power struggle between
Speaker 1: the two when it comes to insanity defense cases. In
Speaker 1: a world governed by laws and rational choices, what happens
Speaker 1: of some of us, maybe even all of us, can't
Speaker 1: actually control all of our actions. What happens if our
Speaker 1: own brain goes rogue on us. The way that James
Speaker 1: Holmes has did. The insanity defense is an attempt to
Speaker 1: take into account this possibility. But as our scientific understanding
Speaker 1: of the brain grows, so do the challenges of accommodating
Speaker 1: the complexity of human psychology within the law. One of
Speaker 1: the reasons James Holmes wanted to be a neuroscientist was
Speaker 1: to better understand his own mental illness. The jury at
Speaker 1: his trial got a close up look at Holmes's broken mind.
Speaker 1: One of the experts at his trial performed an m
Speaker 1: r I scan of Holmes's brain and compared it to
Speaker 1: a sample of others. She told the jury about her findings,
Speaker 1: and there were several significant differences that were noted in
Speaker 1: his brain compared to the normative sample of people los
Speaker 1: leiosany disease. The jury was shown an m r I
Speaker 1: image of the top right front portion of Holmes's brain,
Speaker 1: the part that's important to emotions, motivation, and controlling inappropriate behavior.
Speaker 1: This part of Holmes's brain was smaller than of the population.
Speaker 1: In other words, Holmes had well below average brain volume
Speaker 1: in those areas that are important to emotions and decision making.
Speaker 1: James Holmes was not the first mash shooter to realize
Speaker 1: there was something physiologically wrong inside his brain. From the
Speaker 1: observation room twenty six floors up, a killer terrified students
Speaker 1: and others on the campus of Texas University. He was
Speaker 1: Charles Whitman, twenty four, an ex marine a dead shop.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty six, Charles Whitman climbed to the top
Speaker 1: of a tower in Austin, Texas, and open fire below.
Speaker 1: On ninety minutes. Nothing could be done against him. A
Speaker 1: tumor on the brain drove him across the border line
Speaker 1: of Saturday to spread and down. Whitman killed fourteen and
Speaker 1: wounded nearly forty more. Andrea Alden in his suicide note,
Speaker 1: he said, please do a postmortem and examine my brain
Speaker 1: and find out what is wrong with me, because I'm
Speaker 1: not myself anymore. And it turned out he had a
Speaker 1: rather large lesion on the area of his brain that
Speaker 1: would have controlled these terrible actions. Whitman's story was an
Speaker 1: extreme case, but it highlights well the biological foundations of
Speaker 1: violent antisocial behavior. Mental illness can manifest in myriad ways
Speaker 1: when our brains fail to coordinate some of the billions
Speaker 1: of cells they control. It is a daunting thing for
Speaker 1: doctors and scientists to try to understand, and it can
Speaker 1: be even harder to communicate that challenge in a court
Speaker 1: of law. The law is kind of designed as a
Speaker 1: one size fits all, just focus on the individual and
Speaker 1: what they did, and that's it um And what psychology
Speaker 1: and neuroscience are trying to do is saying, like, no,
Speaker 1: this is a much more complex system. There's a lot
Speaker 1: more you need to understand before you can make judgments
Speaker 1: about people's behavior. Or their thoughts or their actions. And
Speaker 1: there's a lot more we need to understand about our
Speaker 1: mental health too. Up next, we're starting to learn more
Speaker 1: about what makes psychopaths and others with severe psychiatric disorders tick,
Speaker 1: and how the rest of us are not as different
Speaker 1: from them as we would like to believe. Hello Fresh
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Speaker 1: thread e D in promo code thread a D. The
Speaker 1: case of Jeffrey Dahmer shocked the nation in Dahmer was
Speaker 1: accused of the murder and cannibalism of seventeen men and boys.
Speaker 1: One long time acquaintance describes Dahmer as one weird dude.
Speaker 1: A neighbor offered a similar description. In my opinion, he
Speaker 1: appeared to me to be a geeky that I mean,
Speaker 1: a guy that stays to itself and just do weird things,
Speaker 1: unlike anyone else. Like suspicious. Damer played insanity at trial
Speaker 1: if he claimed mental diseases behind his grizzly actions. The
Speaker 1: jury in Milwaukee, Wisconsin disagreed. They found Dahmer legally, saying
Speaker 1: the question of legal insanity often comes up in cases
Speaker 1: of serial killers and psychopaths like Dahmer. James Fallon is
Speaker 1: a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University
Speaker 1: of California, Irvine. Now. A psychopath, or what's called a
Speaker 1: primary psychopath, is somebody I described who has no sense
Speaker 1: of moral reasoning. They really don't consider what they're doing wrong,
Speaker 1: even though they know you think it's wrong. Fallon is
Speaker 1: an expert on the brains and murderous psychopaths. He's found
Speaker 1: that the brains of these killers share similar traits, including
Speaker 1: a pattern of low brain function in parts of the
Speaker 1: frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, the areas associated
Speaker 1: with self control and empathy. Many of them really don't
Speaker 1: have the capability to understand what they're doing is wrong,
Speaker 1: or they have They have these urges and impulses that
Speaker 1: are just like somebody, Um, you know, I have the
Speaker 1: self control right now not to pee in my pants,
Speaker 1: but come back in six hours, I'm gonna lose that control.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna be able to do it. It's like that.
Speaker 1: Fallon argues that are legal and religious notions of good
Speaker 1: and evil are outdated when it comes to understanding such
Speaker 1: urges and the brains of psychopaths and others with psychiatric disorders.
Speaker 1: If you're a neuroscientist or in psychiatry, it's hard to
Speaker 1: find somebody who's truly evil. People with the psychiatric disorders
Speaker 1: can't be evil, right because they either don't know what's
Speaker 1: wrong or they can't even control it. So in that case,
Speaker 1: it makes the insanity defense pretty you know, odd, because
Speaker 1: you end up with very few people were culpable or
Speaker 1: capable of the of of their crimes. And the difference
Speaker 1: between those with severe psychiatric disorders and the rest of
Speaker 1: us is often more a matter of degree than kinds.
Speaker 1: As fallon, and he should know he's not only an
Speaker 1: accomplished neuroscientist, he's also a self admitted borderline psychle a path.
Speaker 1: One time, Falin included scans of his own brain and
Speaker 1: those of family members into a study he was conducting.
Speaker 1: They were supposed to be the control group, the normal brains.
Speaker 1: Then he made an alarming discovery. Then I got to
Speaker 1: the last scan and I said, okay, guys, to the
Speaker 1: technician's very funny, you've slipped in one of these psychopathic
Speaker 1: murderers into my family's scans. Ha ha. You know, we
Speaker 1: play tricks on each other in the lab. So this
Speaker 1: was nothing new. They no, no, no, no, no, no no,
Speaker 1: this is really somebody in your family. I said, whoever
Speaker 1: this is shouldn't be walking around an open society. It's
Speaker 1: gonna be a very dangerous person because it's got a
Speaker 1: lot of brain damage and a lot of that's very
Speaker 1: consistent with a full psychopath. And so I have to
Speaker 1: like peel off the name, uh, you know, responsibly. I
Speaker 1: had to do that, and it peeled it back and
Speaker 1: there was my name. Valin had the brain of a psychopath,
Speaker 1: but he did not become like the serial killers. He studies.
Speaker 1: There's more to our destinies than just our brain anatomy.
Speaker 1: He argues, often something in our environment triggers our biological predisposition.
Speaker 1: The vast majority of psychopathic criminals, for example, were abused
Speaker 1: as young children. Falon was not. Still, what happens in
Speaker 1: your physical brain matters, and it's often not within your control,
Speaker 1: and whether you know the difference between right and wrong
Speaker 1: might be irrelevant to the actions you take. Andrea Alden again,
Speaker 1: and ultimately, what it comes down to is we are
Speaker 1: now reaching the point where we understand that, um, there
Speaker 1: is no distinction between mind and body like you are
Speaker 1: your brain. Your brain is everything you know. If there
Speaker 1: are injuries to specific areas of your brain, it's going
Speaker 1: to change the way you behave possibly make you do
Speaker 1: things you never thought you would do, like commit crimes.
Speaker 1: And the complex nature of the human brain remains a
Speaker 1: big challenge for the law and the courts to address,
Speaker 1: and the current system has trouble both identifying defendants who
Speaker 1: are legally insane and figuring out what to do with
Speaker 1: those who are convicted. There's a common belief that most
Speaker 1: defendants found not guilty by reason of insanity are quickly released.
Speaker 1: Like lorraina Bob it was, She's spent only a matter
Speaker 1: of weeks in a mental hospital after being acquitted of
Speaker 1: cutting off her husband's penis. In reality, most defendants who
Speaker 1: are found not guilty by reason of insanity spend more
Speaker 1: time and institutions than people who are found guilty of
Speaker 1: the same charges. This is Dr William Read again, the
Speaker 1: court appointed psychiatric expert in the James Holmes case. People
Speaker 1: found not guilty by reason of insanity, they routinely spend
Speaker 1: more time off the streets than people who are found
Speaker 1: guilty of similar crimes, and particularly than people who have
Speaker 1: bargained their played down to a lesser crime. So it's
Speaker 1: very much not someone quote getting off unquote with an
Speaker 1: insanity defense. The way that the system treats those who
Speaker 1: plead insanity stems from a broader misunderstanding of mental illness,
Speaker 1: says Andrea Alden. I think that insanity defense is so
Speaker 1: controversial because people don't understand it. People don't understand mental illness.
Speaker 1: People are afraid of mental illness, and the stigma attached
Speaker 1: to mental illness can poison how those suffering from it
Speaker 1: are treated under the law. William read again, people with
Speaker 1: mental illness, even severe mental illness, have a perfect right
Speaker 1: to be found guilty and responsible, just as they have
Speaker 1: a right to uh marry and have kids and hold
Speaker 1: jobs and things, unless they show that they don't have
Speaker 1: the ability to be found responsible. In facts as read,
Speaker 1: those with mental illnesses are less likely overall to be
Speaker 1: violent than people without mental illness. I am much more worried,
Speaker 1: and I think the cops are much more worried about
Speaker 1: career criminals, about drunks, about crackheads, about people who are
Speaker 1: simply mean and antisocial as they go along robbing people
Speaker 1: and mugging people and hurting people for their own gain.
Speaker 1: This is not a characteristic of the mentally ill, and
Speaker 1: it's quite unfair to stigmatize them with that. The insanity
Speaker 1: defense focuses almost exclusively on the mindset of defendants, and
Speaker 1: that's understandable they're the ones on trial. But the determination
Speaker 1: of guilt or innocence in any given case, that determination
Speaker 1: has to go through a number of other brains as well.
Speaker 1: The brains of the investigators and prosecutors building their case,
Speaker 1: the brains of the attorneys marshaling an argument in the courtroom,
Speaker 1: the brains of the psychiatric experts making their analyzes, the
Speaker 1: brain of the judge hearing the case, and most importantly,
Speaker 1: the brains of the jurors themselves. Each of these brains
Speaker 1: is human, fallible, prone to unconscious bias, prejudice, and mistakes.
Speaker 1: Operating on incomplete information and imperfect science, it's hard to
Speaker 1: climb inside the brain of the accused and to understand
Speaker 1: what they were thinking at the time of a crime,
Speaker 1: whether they knew the difference between right and wrong. But
Speaker 1: it can also be difficult for lawyers, experts, judges, jurors,
Speaker 1: and the rest of us to know the difference between
Speaker 1: right and wrong, ourselves to make wise decisions about guilt
Speaker 1: and punishment. Given the complexities of human psychology, Richard Bonnie,
Speaker 1: these are tough calls to make. We've got tough calls
Speaker 1: to make about the clinical questions, and then ultimately you
Speaker 1: have a tough call to make about how these legal
Speaker 1: formulas apply. Still, however much we improve our knowledge of
Speaker 1: the brain or the sophistication of our laws, it will
Speaker 1: not change the past. We're all with Aurora tonight. It
Speaker 1: was this night, five years ago that mother's daughters, fathers, sons,
Speaker 1: and friends were making plans to see a movie. Just
Speaker 1: after midnight on July, residents of Aurora, Colorado, gathered to
Speaker 1: hold a late night vigil for loved ones who died
Speaker 1: at the hands of James Holmes five years earlier. The
Speaker 1: mourners huddled together holding red roses and candles. The names
Speaker 1: of those who lost their lives in the shooting were
Speaker 1: read aloud, and white balloons released. Jonathan Blunk, Alex Sander, Bike,
Speaker 1: Jesse Childress, Gordon Cowden. In the end, no explanation of
Speaker 1: the broken brain of James Holmes or why he opened
Speaker 1: fire that dark night will bring back the dead. In
Speaker 1: aurora or undo what was done, and the criminal law
Speaker 1: is not designed to bring closure or comfort. We can
Speaker 1: only do our best to prevent future auroras and to
Speaker 1: challenge ourselves to take the time to remember what went before.
Speaker 1: Rebecca Windo, let's pause for a moment of silence. The
Speaker 1: Threat is produced by Robert Coulos, Sofia Perpetua and me
Speaker 1: Sean braswell Chris Hoff engineered our show. Next week, we
Speaker 1: returned with a special bonus episode that tells the story
Speaker 1: of how this season of The Thread connects with our
Speaker 1: first season about the murder of the rock star John Lennon.
Speaker 1: To learn more about The Thread, visit Aussie dot com,
Speaker 1: slash the Thread all one word, and make sure to
Speaker 1: subscribe to The Thread on Apple podcasts, follow us on
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Check us out at Assie dot com or on Twitter
Speaker 1: and Facebook. If you love surprising, engaging stories from history,
Speaker 1: look no further than the flashback section of Ausi dot com.
Speaker 1: That's o z Y dot com. As always, thanks for listening.