WEBVTT - An Insane Defense? 0:00:03.720 --> 0:00:06.600 What makes a person legally insane? Can you know the 0:00:06.640 --> 0:00:09.880 difference between right and wrong and still be considered insane? 0:00:10.720 --> 0:00:13.000 These are some of the questions we've considered this season 0:00:13.039 --> 0:00:16.680 on the Thread exploring the insanity defense, But there are 0:00:16.680 --> 0:00:19.439 still others, like how can the law keep up with 0:00:19.480 --> 0:00:21.880 what we are learning from science about the human brain? 0:00:22.520 --> 0:00:25.439 Can any of us really control our actions? And what 0:00:25.480 --> 0:00:35.400 should we do about those of us who cannot. In July, 0:00:36.479 --> 0:00:39.400 a graduate student named James Holmes walked through the doors 0:00:39.400 --> 0:00:43.600 of the Century sixteen movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Witnesses 0:00:43.640 --> 0:00:47.280 say Holmes fired into the air and then started shooting 0:00:47.320 --> 0:00:50.640 into the crowd. Holmes killed twelve people and injured fifty 0:00:50.680 --> 0:00:53.360 eight others. He thought the killings would boost his own 0:00:53.600 --> 0:00:58.000 quote human capital. He called this his mission, and the 0:00:58.080 --> 0:01:01.240 mission was to kill as many people as possible. Holmes 0:01:01.320 --> 0:01:04.119 pled not guilty by reason of insanity at his trial. 0:01:04.319 --> 0:01:07.080 As we heard an episode one this season, there will 0:01:07.120 --> 0:01:09.600 be no doubt in your minds by the end of 0:01:09.640 --> 0:01:17.560 this trial that Mr Holmes is severely mentally ill. None 0:01:18.240 --> 0:01:21.280 Holmes was mentally ill, but a Colorado jury did not 0:01:21.360 --> 0:01:24.120 think he was insane under the law. After listening to 0:01:24.160 --> 0:01:28.679 witnesses and psychiatric experts, they decided Holmes knew the difference 0:01:28.720 --> 0:01:31.520 between right and wrong at the time he committed the crime, 0:01:31.880 --> 0:01:35.480 the standard for legal insanity in Colorado and many other states. 0:01:35.920 --> 0:01:39.400 How in the world can someone who kills twelve people 0:01:39.480 --> 0:01:43.640 and injures another fifty eight and leaves a terrible tragedy 0:01:44.200 --> 0:01:47.560 in a theater at midnight? How in the world can 0:01:47.600 --> 0:01:51.919 that person be viewed as sane in any reasonable sense. 0:01:55.240 --> 0:01:58.120 Holmes was found guilty, just like the vast majority of 0:01:58.120 --> 0:02:02.440 criminal defendants today who invoke the insanity defense. To understand 0:02:02.520 --> 0:02:09.200 why requires a journey through history. The conviction of James 0:02:09.200 --> 0:02:13.240 Holmes really begins almost two centuries ago in England. At 0:02:13.240 --> 0:02:15.800 the time, Queen Victoria and the British House of Lords 0:02:16.040 --> 0:02:18.440 could not have imagined a crime like the one committed 0:02:18.520 --> 0:02:22.600 by Holmes, But if you look close enough, their fingerprints 0:02:22.600 --> 0:02:29.880 are all over his fate. I'm Sean Braswell. Each season 0:02:29.880 --> 0:02:32.160 on The Thread, we unravel the stories behind some of 0:02:32.200 --> 0:02:35.240 the most important lives and events in history to discover, 0:02:35.600 --> 0:02:39.280 essentially how one thing leads to another. This season, we've 0:02:39.280 --> 0:02:42.600 explored the crazy history of perhaps the most controversial defense 0:02:42.600 --> 0:02:45.760 in the criminal law not guilty by way of insanity. 0:02:46.240 --> 0:02:49.480 From James Holmes to Lorraine of Bobbitt to John Hinckley Jr. 0:02:49.639 --> 0:02:52.760 Some of history's most notorious criminal defendants are linked by 0:02:52.800 --> 0:02:56.320 this common thread. In the last episode, we heard about 0:02:56.320 --> 0:02:59.600 the first use of the temporary insanity defense in American law, 0:02:59.800 --> 0:03:02.519 the case of Daniel Sickles. He was the New York 0:03:02.520 --> 0:03:06.160 congressman who murdered Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, 0:03:06.200 --> 0:03:08.959 just yards from the White House in eighteen fifty nine. 0:03:09.000 --> 0:03:11.280 I mean literally, if it was an episode of House 0:03:11.320 --> 0:03:14.840 of Cards, you wouldn't believe it, right, but it really happened. 0:03:15.080 --> 0:03:20.040 You know, There's really nothing like it in American political history. 0:03:20.720 --> 0:03:23.560 Sickle's legal dream team relied on an older case from 0:03:23.600 --> 0:03:27.000 another country in order to save the congressman from being hanged. 0:03:27.440 --> 0:03:29.760 In this episode, we will finish this season's thread with 0:03:29.800 --> 0:03:34.000 that case in England, where the modern insanity defense really began. 0:03:35.040 --> 0:03:38.160 We'll also dive into whether the insanity defense really makes sense, 0:03:38.400 --> 0:03:40.600 especially in light of what we know about mental illness 0:03:40.720 --> 0:03:43.560 in the human brain. Today. We'll learn how the defense 0:03:43.600 --> 0:03:47.160 sits uncomfortably at the intersection of law and human psychology, 0:03:47.320 --> 0:03:50.720 how it challenges lawyers, judges, and juries in their pursuit 0:03:50.760 --> 0:03:53.119 of justice, and how it speaks to things that all 0:03:53.120 --> 0:03:56.840 of us hold dear, such as moral responsibility, free will, 0:03:57.440 --> 0:04:10.080 even our own sanity. Our story this season really begins 0:04:10.120 --> 0:04:13.080 in England in the nineteenth century. There are actually two 0:04:13.120 --> 0:04:17.160 English cases that ushered in today's insanity defense. Both were 0:04:17.200 --> 0:04:19.920 attempts to murder a British leader. The first was in 0:04:19.960 --> 0:04:22.680 May of eighteen hundred, when a former soldier tried to 0:04:22.760 --> 0:04:26.039 kill King George. The third, Andrea Alden, is the author 0:04:26.080 --> 0:04:30.120 of Disorder in the Court, Morality Myth and the Insanity Defense. 0:04:30.480 --> 0:04:34.320 James Hadfield was a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. He 0:04:34.360 --> 0:04:37.200 received some sort of head injury that was documented. At 0:04:37.200 --> 0:04:39.520 the time. We didn't have the words traumatic brain injury, 0:04:39.560 --> 0:04:42.800 but that's basically what it was. Hadfield received eight blows 0:04:42.800 --> 0:04:45.680 to the head from a saber while fighting for his country. 0:04:45.839 --> 0:04:48.640 It was widely acknowledged that he came back from the 0:04:48.640 --> 0:04:51.839 war not the same person that he went um. Clearly 0:04:52.360 --> 0:04:55.000 what he had been through affected him and affected his 0:04:55.120 --> 0:04:58.520 personality and his behavior. Hadfield was convinced that the Second 0:04:58.520 --> 0:05:01.279 Coming of Jesus Christ depend into upon his own death 0:05:01.760 --> 0:05:03.880 that he himself needed to be killed in order to 0:05:03.920 --> 0:05:08.760 fulfill a sacred prophecy. So his plan was to attempt 0:05:08.800 --> 0:05:12.160 to assassinate the king with the hopes that he would 0:05:12.240 --> 0:05:14.880 in the process be killed by people trying to defend 0:05:14.920 --> 0:05:17.919 the king, and then he could fulfill this prophecy somehow. 0:05:18.279 --> 0:05:20.559 And so is King George the Third in his royal 0:05:20.640 --> 0:05:24.920 entourage entered a theater in London on May hundred, Hadfield 0:05:24.920 --> 0:05:29.039 fired a pistol at the monarch. The shots missed. The King. 0:05:29.440 --> 0:05:32.760 Hadfield was apprehended and charged with high treason, but the 0:05:32.839 --> 0:05:36.039 serious nature of Hadfield's crime meant he received a top 0:05:36.120 --> 0:05:40.120 notch legal defender. He had what was really the first 0:05:40.200 --> 0:05:44.120 kind of star defense attorney in a notable insanity defense trial, 0:05:44.200 --> 0:05:47.920 who was Thomas Erskine Um, who really kind of set 0:05:47.960 --> 0:05:51.240 the bar for making arguments about the legal standards for 0:05:51.240 --> 0:05:55.520 insanity that kind of changed the game going forward. Thomas 0:05:55.560 --> 0:05:57.400 erskine was the son of an English lord and the the 0:05:57.600 --> 0:06:00.680 most sought after criminal defense lawyer of his air. But 0:06:00.800 --> 0:06:03.720 at the time, the causes of mental illness, including the 0:06:03.720 --> 0:06:07.760 delusions experienced by James Hadfield we're not well understood. So 0:06:07.880 --> 0:06:10.880 at this point we still are looking at conceptions of 0:06:10.920 --> 0:06:16.000 mental illness as something either animal like or childlike, where 0:06:16.040 --> 0:06:20.080 the criminal either had the lack of ability to understand 0:06:20.120 --> 0:06:23.640 the nature of his or her actions UM, and that 0:06:24.080 --> 0:06:26.440 some of the judges would say either they had no 0:06:26.520 --> 0:06:29.640 more understanding than a wild beast or than a child. 0:06:30.200 --> 0:06:33.120 In other words, to be insane in nineteenth century England, 0:06:33.480 --> 0:06:37.760 make you a raving mad or infantile. Hadfield's lawyer Thomas Erskine, 0:06:38.040 --> 0:06:42.520 set out to change that. He felt that the concept 0:06:42.560 --> 0:06:44.760 of having no more understanding than a child or a 0:06:44.800 --> 0:06:49.640 wild beast was UM far too narrow of a construction 0:06:49.800 --> 0:06:53.279 of what mental illness as it pertains to criminal justice 0:06:53.520 --> 0:06:56.320 UM looked like, so he argued that it needed to 0:06:56.960 --> 0:07:02.200 be expanded to encompass more and their experiences. At trial, 0:07:02.440 --> 0:07:05.760 Erskine argued that Hadfield was insane not because he acted 0:07:05.800 --> 0:07:08.120 like a child or a wild beast, but because he 0:07:08.160 --> 0:07:10.800 was delusional at the time of the shooting he lost 0:07:10.840 --> 0:07:12.920 touch with the world around him as a result of 0:07:12.920 --> 0:07:16.440 his head injuries. To make his case, Erskine called twenty 0:07:16.440 --> 0:07:18.720 witnesses to the stand in a trial that took just 0:07:18.840 --> 0:07:23.000 six hours. These included doctors who claimed Hadfield's actions were 0:07:23.040 --> 0:07:26.000 the result of his brain injury. Hadfield was found to 0:07:26.040 --> 0:07:29.520 be insane and not guilty of treason. Thanks to Erskine's 0:07:29.560 --> 0:07:34.840 landmark defense, Hadfield was spared execution. Instead, he was ordered 0:07:34.880 --> 0:07:37.560 to spend the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital. 0:07:39.640 --> 0:07:42.600 The Hadfield incident could have been a small footnote in history. 0:07:42.840 --> 0:07:45.760 The King wasn't harmed after all. Instead, it laid the 0:07:45.760 --> 0:07:48.760 groundwork for an even bigger insanity case in England four 0:07:48.800 --> 0:07:52.480 decades later, one that still governs how many insanity cases 0:07:52.520 --> 0:07:58.600 play out today. Daniel McNaughton was a lowly Scottish woodcutter, 0:07:58.920 --> 0:08:00.920 someone whose name would you usually be lost to the 0:08:00.960 --> 0:08:04.240 sands of history. Instead, his name is familiar to most 0:08:04.320 --> 0:08:07.320 lawyers and law students today, and it's synonymous with the 0:08:07.320 --> 0:08:11.480 insanity defense. And here's why. The story begins. When McNaughton 0:08:11.520 --> 0:08:14.239 decides to murder a British leader, even though the person 0:08:14.280 --> 0:08:19.360 he shot wasn't his intended target. McNaughton um shot a 0:08:19.400 --> 0:08:22.240 man named Edward Drummond in the middle of the street 0:08:22.440 --> 0:08:25.240 in London the middle of the day, just walked up 0:08:25.240 --> 0:08:28.440 behind him and shot him. So it turned out that 0:08:28.560 --> 0:08:32.720 McNaughton believed he was shooting the Prime Minister at the time, 0:08:32.800 --> 0:08:36.640 and Edward Drummond was actually his private secretary. McNaughton claimed 0:08:36.640 --> 0:08:39.760 that the Prime Minister and his political party were persecuting him. 0:08:39.920 --> 0:08:43.400 We would probably recognize Mr McNaughton as suffering from something 0:08:43.480 --> 0:08:46.520 like paranoid schizophrenia if we were to get him in 0:08:46.520 --> 0:08:49.760 the care of a psychiatrist today, but unfortunately at the 0:08:49.800 --> 0:08:53.400 time we didn't quite understand what that meant. Edward Drummond 0:08:53.440 --> 0:08:56.120 died from his wounds and McNaughton was charged with murder. 0:08:56.559 --> 0:08:59.000 His trial began six weeks later in London before a 0:08:59.080 --> 0:09:02.760 large crowd of spec taters, including the famous writer Charles Dickens. 0:09:03.400 --> 0:09:07.280 McNaughton's attorney followed Thomas Erskine's defense of James Hadfield from 0:09:07.320 --> 0:09:10.679 four decades earlier. He argued his client was insane at 0:09:10.679 --> 0:09:12.600 the time of the shooting and therefore did not have 0:09:12.679 --> 0:09:16.280 the necessary criminal intent to be found guilty. He called 0:09:16.320 --> 0:09:20.120 a medical expert who examined McNaughton and testified quote the 0:09:20.160 --> 0:09:25.720 defendants moral faculties were impaired by extraordinary delusion. The defense worked, 0:09:26.160 --> 0:09:28.760 and in fact, the jury never even retired to deliberate. 0:09:28.800 --> 0:09:31.079 They just huddled together in the jury box and came 0:09:31.160 --> 0:09:33.280 up with the decision that he could be found not 0:09:33.280 --> 0:09:36.560 guilty by reason of insanity. The British public and press 0:09:36.600 --> 0:09:41.160 were outraged. Essentially, the public felt that he had gotten 0:09:41.160 --> 0:09:44.559 away with it, um, that he had feigned insanity um, 0:09:44.600 --> 0:09:48.280 and also that he was somehow um getting off scot free. 0:09:48.640 --> 0:09:51.400 And somebody else was not too pleased with the jury's verdict. 0:09:51.720 --> 0:09:55.959 Queen Victoria at the time had been had recently been 0:09:56.000 --> 0:09:58.640 the victim of an assassination attempt by somebody who also 0:09:58.679 --> 0:10:03.040 pled insanity, so she was creating pissed about the whole thing. 0:10:03.440 --> 0:10:06.160 A few years earlier, a deranged eighteen year old man 0:10:06.240 --> 0:10:09.040 had taken a shot at the pregnant Queen just outside 0:10:09.040 --> 0:10:13.000 Buckingham Palace. He, like McNaughton, had been found not guilty 0:10:13.000 --> 0:10:16.559 on grounds of insanity. After the McNaughton verdict, the Queen 0:10:16.600 --> 0:10:19.840 reportedly asked, how could you have been found not guilty? 0:10:19.960 --> 0:10:22.560 He did it, didn't he? She demanded, actually that the 0:10:22.600 --> 0:10:26.240 House of Lords come together and put together some more 0:10:26.520 --> 0:10:30.040 firm standards regarding mentally ill criminal defendants, which had not 0:10:30.200 --> 0:10:33.160 previously existed. What the House of Lords came back with 0:10:33.320 --> 0:10:35.320 is what is still known to this day by lawyers 0:10:35.360 --> 0:10:39.840 as the McNaughton rules, well ultimately emerged from McNaughton is 0:10:39.880 --> 0:10:43.439 still really the foundation of every insanity defense UM standard 0:10:43.480 --> 0:10:45.920 you will see today. At the time of the crime, 0:10:46.280 --> 0:10:49.160 the accused has to be suffering from a mental disease 0:10:49.240 --> 0:10:52.800 or defect that prevents him from knowing the difference between 0:10:52.880 --> 0:10:55.839 right and wrong. The McNaughton rules put a major legal 0:10:55.880 --> 0:10:58.640 stake into the ground in eighteen forty three when it 0:10:58.679 --> 0:11:01.360 came to whether defendant could be considered too insane to 0:11:01.440 --> 0:11:04.440 be convicted of a crime. So, over the years from 0:11:04.480 --> 0:11:07.760 the time that the mcdatin rules were established, UM, with 0:11:07.880 --> 0:11:11.600 every new iteration of the defense, it seemed to broaden 0:11:11.800 --> 0:11:15.320 slightly UM And as we learned more about mental illness, 0:11:15.760 --> 0:11:18.320 we started to try to expand the legal definitions to 0:11:18.520 --> 0:11:22.240 be more compatible with that. You can see the trickle 0:11:22.280 --> 0:11:25.559 down effect of that McNaughton case in later insanity defenses 0:11:25.559 --> 0:11:28.880 that allowed for broader interpretations of the law. Take for example, 0:11:28.920 --> 0:11:31.920 the story of Dan Sickles from episode five. The New 0:11:31.960 --> 0:11:34.280 York Congressman murdered a U. S attorney near the White 0:11:34.320 --> 0:11:37.280 House in eighteen fifty nine, but the aggrieved husband was 0:11:37.320 --> 0:11:40.720 found not guilty because of the temporary insanity, the first 0:11:40.720 --> 0:11:44.559 successful invocation of that defense in American history. And then 0:11:44.559 --> 0:11:47.520 in episode four, we told the story of Pittsburgh millionaire 0:11:47.559 --> 0:11:51.080 Harry Thaw, who killed the famous architects Stanford White because 0:11:51.080 --> 0:11:55.400 White sexually assaulted Thaw's wife. Harry Thaw, like Dan Sickles, 0:11:55.760 --> 0:11:59.040 was acquitted because a jury decided he was temporarily insane 0:11:59.040 --> 0:12:02.640 at the time of the kill. Then decades later, in nine, 0:12:03.600 --> 0:12:06.880 a delusional twenty five year old loaner named John Hinckley Jr. 0:12:07.040 --> 0:12:09.800 Fired six shots at the President of the United States. 0:12:10.400 --> 0:12:13.480 Hinckley's acquittal, as we saw an episode three, resulted in 0:12:13.520 --> 0:12:16.480 a backlash against the insanity defense, and the laws in 0:12:16.559 --> 0:12:20.000 several states retreated back to a narrower standard for insanity. 0:12:20.280 --> 0:12:24.720 Back to McNaughton Andrea Alden, but ultimately, after Hinkley, it 0:12:24.760 --> 0:12:27.360 felt like we kind of sling shotted back. Um. So 0:12:27.559 --> 0:12:29.600 ultimately what we came back to was the only one 0:12:29.600 --> 0:12:32.160 we're really comfortable with was, you know, did they know 0:12:32.320 --> 0:12:34.680 right from wrong at the time that they committed the act? 0:12:36.440 --> 0:12:39.319 So here we are on seventy six years after the 0:12:39.360 --> 0:12:42.600 case of Daniel McNaughton, and its outcome continues to influence 0:12:42.600 --> 0:12:46.960 how many insanity cases play out today. Up next modern 0:12:47.000 --> 0:12:50.359 brain science and how it could shape future insanity defenses. 0:13:00.320 --> 0:13:02.640 When it's time to make a hire for your small business, 0:13:02.840 --> 0:13:05.040 naturally you want to find the best person for the job. 0:13:05.440 --> 0:13:08.400 Odds are that person as on linked In. 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Insanity claims are rare these days. 0:15:29.560 --> 0:15:31.360 They are used in less than one percent of all 0:15:31.400 --> 0:15:35.080 criminal cases, according to one study, and likely for good reason. 0:15:35.640 --> 0:15:38.320 Richard Bonnie is a professor of law into Medicine at 0:15:38.320 --> 0:15:42.120 the University of Virginia. The insanity defense is always an 0:15:42.160 --> 0:15:45.760 uphill battle for the defense because all of us are 0:15:45.960 --> 0:15:50.040 naturally skeptical about insanity claims. It can be hard for 0:15:50.040 --> 0:15:52.160 a jury to put aside the horrific nature of a 0:15:52.160 --> 0:15:55.560 criminal act in order to determine whether the accused was insane. 0:15:55.560 --> 0:15:58.960 At the time, many consider the insanity defense away for 0:15:59.000 --> 0:16:02.760 criminals to escape justice. Attitudes about the defense began to 0:16:02.840 --> 0:16:05.720 change in the nineteen eighties after John Hinckley was acquitted 0:16:05.760 --> 0:16:09.119 of shooting President Reagan almost nine out of ten Americans 0:16:09.120 --> 0:16:12.400 polled felt the insanity defense was a loophole for guilty 0:16:12.440 --> 0:16:16.840 persons trying to escape punishment. Four states also abolished the 0:16:16.840 --> 0:16:20.240 insanity defense, and the law in one of those states, Kansas, 0:16:20.440 --> 0:16:22.520 will be considered by the U. S. Supreme Court in 0:16:22.560 --> 0:16:26.760 October after a challenge from a convicted murderer named Craig Kaylor. 0:16:27.200 --> 0:16:29.840 Back in two thousand nine, a Kansas judge slapped the 0:16:29.880 --> 0:16:33.160 death sentence on Craig Kaylor for the murders of four 0:16:33.200 --> 0:16:36.160 of his family members. Kaylor claimed he'd sunk into deep 0:16:36.200 --> 0:16:39.560 depression after his marriage collapsed, a condition that led to 0:16:39.640 --> 0:16:42.960 him losing touch with reality. Now, the convicted murderer who 0:16:43.000 --> 0:16:45.760 did not have the option to use an insanity defense 0:16:46.120 --> 0:16:48.480 gets to make his case to the nation's highest court. 0:16:48.840 --> 0:16:51.960 But even where insanity cases can be presented, it's not 0:16:52.000 --> 0:16:55.760 easy to win them. Richard Bonnie Again, most insanity claims, 0:16:55.800 --> 0:16:59.720 when they are litigated fail. We put tremendous weight on 0:17:00.120 --> 0:17:04.440 the skill with which the defense is presented, and it's 0:17:04.440 --> 0:17:06.480 still hard to show the accused and not know the 0:17:06.480 --> 0:17:09.280 difference between right and wrong, even for those with clear 0:17:09.320 --> 0:17:13.400 mental illnesses like James Holmes. But just knowing right from 0:17:13.400 --> 0:17:16.560 wrong is not sufficient, says Bonnie. It doesn't capture what's 0:17:16.600 --> 0:17:20.320 really governing a defendants behavior. The dominant influence on what 0:17:20.359 --> 0:17:22.960 they are doing is the psychotic process. And that's why 0:17:22.960 --> 0:17:25.520 we would say the person is not terrible, you know, 0:17:25.560 --> 0:17:28.200 by their knowledge of the law, because now they're being 0:17:28.480 --> 0:17:31.160 you know, driven, not by their recognition of the law 0:17:31.480 --> 0:17:34.720 at all. Bonnie argues, there's a better question to ask 0:17:34.840 --> 0:17:38.679 to get at legal insanity, the question being does the 0:17:38.760 --> 0:17:44.560 person really appreciate um, uh, you know, in an emotional sense, uh, 0:17:44.680 --> 0:17:47.960 the moral enormity or the moral significance of what they 0:17:47.960 --> 0:17:52.359 are doing, or has their delusional belief deprived them, you know, 0:17:52.480 --> 0:17:55.920 of the capacity to do that, And that's the key question. 0:17:59.480 --> 0:18:02.200 The basis of criminal law is the premise that individual 0:18:02.280 --> 0:18:05.400 humans have some measure of free will. We are rational, 0:18:05.520 --> 0:18:08.760 self aware actors. We can control our choices in our 0:18:08.800 --> 0:18:12.080 actions and be held responsible for them when they violate 0:18:12.119 --> 0:18:15.800 social norms. On the other hand, the study of psychiatry 0:18:16.000 --> 0:18:19.800 and serious psychiatric disorders often focus on treating the ailments 0:18:19.800 --> 0:18:24.320 that prevent people from exercising choice or from controlling their actions. 0:18:24.400 --> 0:18:28.439 So if we're talking about retribution and deterrence on one hand, 0:18:28.560 --> 0:18:32.560 and treatment and basically nurturing on the other. They don't 0:18:32.560 --> 0:18:36.240 really work together very well Andrea Olden again, And so 0:18:36.359 --> 0:18:39.879 the language and the concepts used by a psychiatrist don't 0:18:40.119 --> 0:18:43.560 map neatly onto the goals of the criminal justice system. 0:18:43.600 --> 0:18:46.920 So it's very hard for those two systems to communicate 0:18:46.960 --> 0:18:49.880 within one another. And what it has amounted to over 0:18:49.880 --> 0:18:53.240 the years as kind of a territory power struggle between 0:18:53.280 --> 0:18:56.480 the two when it comes to insanity defense cases. In 0:18:56.520 --> 0:19:00.000 a world governed by laws and rational choices, what happens 0:19:00.040 --> 0:19:02.240 of some of us, maybe even all of us, can't 0:19:02.240 --> 0:19:05.520 actually control all of our actions. What happens if our 0:19:05.560 --> 0:19:07.840 own brain goes rogue on us. The way that James 0:19:07.880 --> 0:19:11.080 Holmes has did. The insanity defense is an attempt to 0:19:11.119 --> 0:19:15.040 take into account this possibility. But as our scientific understanding 0:19:15.080 --> 0:19:18.320 of the brain grows, so do the challenges of accommodating 0:19:18.320 --> 0:19:31.320 the complexity of human psychology within the law. One of 0:19:31.320 --> 0:19:34.080 the reasons James Holmes wanted to be a neuroscientist was 0:19:34.119 --> 0:19:37.400 to better understand his own mental illness. The jury at 0:19:37.400 --> 0:19:40.280 his trial got a close up look at Holmes's broken mind. 0:19:40.840 --> 0:19:42.960 One of the experts at his trial performed an m 0:19:43.080 --> 0:19:45.359 r I scan of Holmes's brain and compared it to 0:19:45.400 --> 0:19:48.760 a sample of others. She told the jury about her findings, 0:19:49.119 --> 0:19:54.760 and there were several significant differences that were noted in 0:19:55.000 --> 0:20:00.159 his brain compared to the normative sample of people los 0:20:00.280 --> 0:20:03.120 leiosany disease. The jury was shown an m r I 0:20:03.119 --> 0:20:05.760 image of the top right front portion of Holmes's brain, 0:20:06.119 --> 0:20:10.680 the part that's important to emotions, motivation, and controlling inappropriate behavior. 0:20:11.400 --> 0:20:14.960 This part of Holmes's brain was smaller than of the population. 0:20:15.560 --> 0:20:18.959 In other words, Holmes had well below average brain volume 0:20:19.000 --> 0:20:22.040 in those areas that are important to emotions and decision making. 0:20:23.040 --> 0:20:25.840 James Holmes was not the first mash shooter to realize 0:20:25.840 --> 0:20:30.000 there was something physiologically wrong inside his brain. From the 0:20:30.040 --> 0:20:33.920 observation room twenty six floors up, a killer terrified students 0:20:33.960 --> 0:20:36.679 and others on the campus of Texas University. He was 0:20:36.760 --> 0:20:40.240 Charles Whitman, twenty four, an ex marine a dead shop. 0:20:40.680 --> 0:20:43.760 In nineteen sixty six, Charles Whitman climbed to the top 0:20:43.800 --> 0:20:47.040 of a tower in Austin, Texas, and open fire below. 0:20:47.720 --> 0:20:50.359 On ninety minutes. Nothing could be done against him. A 0:20:50.480 --> 0:20:52.600 tumor on the brain drove him across the border line 0:20:52.600 --> 0:20:56.359 of Saturday to spread and down. Whitman killed fourteen and 0:20:56.359 --> 0:21:00.720 wounded nearly forty more. Andrea Alden in his suicide note, 0:21:00.760 --> 0:21:04.200 he said, please do a postmortem and examine my brain 0:21:04.280 --> 0:21:06.040 and find out what is wrong with me, because I'm 0:21:06.040 --> 0:21:08.960 not myself anymore. And it turned out he had a 0:21:09.080 --> 0:21:11.520 rather large lesion on the area of his brain that 0:21:11.560 --> 0:21:15.560 would have controlled these terrible actions. Whitman's story was an 0:21:15.560 --> 0:21:19.359 extreme case, but it highlights well the biological foundations of 0:21:19.480 --> 0:21:24.159 violent antisocial behavior. Mental illness can manifest in myriad ways 0:21:24.200 --> 0:21:26.520 when our brains fail to coordinate some of the billions 0:21:26.560 --> 0:21:29.399 of cells they control. It is a daunting thing for 0:21:29.520 --> 0:21:32.720 doctors and scientists to try to understand, and it can 0:21:32.720 --> 0:21:35.480 be even harder to communicate that challenge in a court 0:21:35.520 --> 0:21:37.560 of law. The law is kind of designed as a 0:21:37.600 --> 0:21:41.359 one size fits all, just focus on the individual and 0:21:41.400 --> 0:21:44.920 what they did, and that's it um And what psychology 0:21:44.920 --> 0:21:47.080 and neuroscience are trying to do is saying, like, no, 0:21:47.200 --> 0:21:49.520 this is a much more complex system. There's a lot 0:21:49.600 --> 0:21:51.680 more you need to understand before you can make judgments 0:21:51.680 --> 0:21:57.720 about people's behavior. Or their thoughts or their actions. And 0:21:57.760 --> 0:21:59.760 there's a lot more we need to understand about our 0:22:00.119 --> 0:22:03.600 mental health too. Up next, we're starting to learn more 0:22:03.600 --> 0:22:07.440 about what makes psychopaths and others with severe psychiatric disorders tick, 0:22:07.880 --> 0:22:09.520 and how the rest of us are not as different 0:22:09.560 --> 0:22:24.640 from them as we would like to believe. Hello Fresh 0:22:24.720 --> 0:22:27.359 is a meal kit delivery service that shops, plans, and 0:22:27.359 --> 0:22:30.520 delivers step by step recipes and pre measured ingredients so 0:22:30.560 --> 0:22:33.800 you can just cook, eat, and enjoy. Hello Fresh makes 0:22:33.800 --> 0:22:36.960 cooking enjoyable and easy. How does it work? 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