Speaker 1: What is the insanity defense? Are some people's brains so
Speaker 1: different from yours that it makes sense to categorize them
Speaker 1: differently under the legal system? How could a mother kill
Speaker 1: her children? Can you commit a crime without meaning to?
Speaker 1: How does a legal system decide how to rule on
Speaker 1: these issues? And how are science and law strange? Bedfellows?
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm
Speaker 1: a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these episodes
Speaker 1: we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand
Speaker 1: why and how our lives look the way we do. Now,
Speaker 1: we all hear the word insane, somebody is acting insane,
Speaker 1: something like that. But the first thing to note is
Speaker 1: that insanity is not a medical term. It's not used
Speaker 1: in psychiatry or neuroscience. It's instead a term used by
Speaker 1: the legal system. And I'm going to do a two
Speaker 1: part episode about the insanity defense, where it comes from,
Speaker 1: and why it is so difficult as a society to
Speaker 1: decide where we want to draw our lines in the sand.
Speaker 1: What I mean is, sometimes a person commits a crime
Speaker 1: and we say they're clearly different from us, but we're
Speaker 1: not sure quite how and we're not sure if that
Speaker 1: should release them from culpability. As we're going to see,
Speaker 1: there is no hard and fast line where we as
Speaker 1: a society can say, oh, that person is on this
Speaker 1: side of the line and this person isn't. Now, this
Speaker 1: is a theme I've expressed in various ways in all
Speaker 1: of these episodes, which is, but brains are very different
Speaker 1: from one another, and most everything that we are interested
Speaker 1: in lives on a spectrum, and more than a spectrum,
Speaker 1: on a very complicated landscape. People are very different on
Speaker 1: the inside, and the question is how do we build
Speaker 1: rules as a society to make things run well. So
Speaker 1: let's get started. What I want to tell you about
Speaker 1: is a young woman named Andrea So. By the time
Speaker 1: Andrea was a teenager, she held the world by the tail.
Speaker 1: She was the valedictorian of her high school. She was
Speaker 1: the captain of her swim team. She was a member
Speaker 1: of the National Honor Society. By twenty two years old,
Speaker 1: she became a registered nurse and she worked at M. D.
Speaker 1: Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. And her life got
Speaker 1: even better when she met the man of her dreams,
Speaker 1: a guy named Rusty, at their apartment complex and Four
Speaker 1: years later, they got married, and they announced to friends
Speaker 1: and family that they were going to have as many babies.
Speaker 2: As nature allowed.
Speaker 1: So their first child was born ten months later, and
Speaker 1: over the next six years they had four more handsome
Speaker 1: and healthy children. One June morning in two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: Rusty left the house for his work at NASA, and
Speaker 1: as soon as he left, Andrea turned on the bathtub,
Speaker 1: and one by one she held her beloved children down
Speaker 1: under the water until they drowned. Her oldest child, who
Speaker 1: was seven years old, saw his six month old sister
Speaker 1: face down in the bathtub, and he tried to flee,
Speaker 1: but Andrea chased him and caught him and drowned him
Speaker 1: next to his sister's floating body. She laid the bodies
Speaker 1: of the youngest four on the bed, and she left
Speaker 1: the eldest in the bathtub. And Andrea later told a
Speaker 1: homicide sergeant that she had considered killing her.
Speaker 2: Children for two years now.
Speaker 1: People often grabbedavitate towards stories of crime, saft's, assaults, murders,
Speaker 1: and so on. Because these acts are so distant from
Speaker 1: what they could contemplate themselves. We are tantalized that someone
Speaker 1: could behave in a particular way, and we are always
Speaker 1: confronted with a question how should society respond? So our
Speaker 1: intuition seems to provide ready answers to these questions. But
Speaker 1: new light on a lot of these questions comes from
Speaker 1: a field that at first blush seems far away from
Speaker 1: the prison system, and that is neuroscience. The past century
Speaker 1: has made it really clear that a person's behavior and
Speaker 1: a person's brain are inextricably linked. When someone goes on
Speaker 1: a new medication, their behavior can change. When they get
Speaker 1: a degenerative brain disorder, their behavior can change when they
Speaker 1: develop a brain tumor, or they get a traumatic brain injury.
Speaker 1: Their behavior can change in the presence of drugs or alcohol,
Speaker 1: or stress, or strokes or schizophrenia. There are alterations in
Speaker 1: decision making and the appetite for risk, and this is
Speaker 1: why questions about crime inevitably lead to the doorstep of
Speaker 1: brain science. Now, when we're children, we try to understand
Speaker 1: how a criminal must feel. From our own point of view,
Speaker 1: we often conclude that a criminal must feel bad for
Speaker 1: what he or she has done. But as we mature,
Speaker 1: it becomes clearer that people can be really different on
Speaker 1: the inside. Although we all look similar, we each live
Speaker 1: in a somewhat different cosmos inside our skulls, and this
Speaker 1: understanding has led legal systems to try to contend with
Speaker 1: this variety. Now, the simple approach is to assume that
Speaker 1: each perpetrator sees the world the same way. The reason
Speaker 1: this is a simple and straightforward approach is because it
Speaker 1: allows everyone to get equal punishment for the same crime.
Speaker 1: But it has become clear to societies over a long
Speaker 1: time that this viewpoint falls short. Now in many episodes
Speaker 1: in this podcast, we've seen that different people can have
Speaker 1: very different realities on the inside. And in today's episode
Speaker 1: and next week's will come to understand what this teaches
Speaker 1: us about crime, and what crime teaches us about the brain.
Speaker 1: Dozens of new questions and new issues spring from the
Speaker 1: intersection of neuroscience and the law, and this is what
Speaker 1: these next couple episodes are about. And I want to
Speaker 1: make one critical note first, which is that a deeper
Speaker 1: understanding of the brain and its related behavior doesn't let
Speaker 1: anyone off the hook. Explanation is not exculpation. Our society
Speaker 1: still needs to keep violent aggressors and bad acts durs
Speaker 1: off the streets. Instead, a meaningful understanding of the brain
Speaker 1: can provide a rational basis for sentencing, and it can
Speaker 1: provide customized rehabilitation. When crimes arise from biological problems, there
Speaker 1: are often meaningful rehabilitative strategies available. Sometimes we have better
Speaker 1: options than assuming that incarceration is the single available solution.
Speaker 1: So let's return to Andrea. Although she was a top
Speaker 1: student and a popular athlete, her success is masked deeper problems.
Speaker 2: She suffered from bolimia.
Speaker 1: She was routinely caught in the cogwheels of depression, and
Speaker 1: at least once in her teenage years, she admitted to
Speaker 1: a friend that she was considering suicide. And what developed
Speaker 1: over time is that after the birth of her fourth child,
Speaker 1: Andrea fell under the grip of postpartum depression. Postpartum means
Speaker 1: after birth. So one day, in tears, she called her husband,
Speaker 1: Rusty at work. He came rushing home to find Andrea distraught.
Speaker 2: She was shaking.
Speaker 1: Uncontrollably, she was chewing on her fingers, and the next
Speaker 1: day she attempted suicide by overdosing on pills. So Rusty
Speaker 1: looked around desperately for psychiatric care. And Andrea was admitted
Speaker 1: to Houston's Methodist Hospital psychiatric unit, but then she was
Speaker 1: discharged six days later because of insurance restrictions, and so
Speaker 1: things continued to get worse for Andrea. She was prescribed
Speaker 1: an antidepressant, but the medicine only slightly improved her condition,
Speaker 1: and her doctor gave her samples of an antipsychotic drug
Speaker 1: and she flushed those pills down the toilet. So four
Speaker 1: weeks after being discharged from the hospital, Andrea attempted suicide again.
Speaker 1: This time she held a knife to her throat before
Speaker 1: her husband intervened. So she returned to psychiatric care and
Speaker 1: she was diagnosed with a major depressive disorder, and eventually
Speaker 1: it was determined that Andrea suffered from postpartum psychosis. Postpartum
Speaker 1: meaning after birth, and psychosis is a condition in which
Speaker 1: thought and emotions are so affected that one loses contact
Speaker 1: with reality. So as you can imagine, postpartum psychosis is
Speaker 1: a mental health emergency in which a mother has a
Speaker 1: distorted sense of reality after giving birth. She can have
Speaker 1: delusions and hallucinations and paranoia, and in the worst cases,
Speaker 1: mothers work to harm themselves or their babies. Now, thankfully,
Speaker 1: this is rare. It's something like one in a thousand births,
Speaker 1: but this is what Andrea suffered from. So she was
Speaker 1: put on antipsychotic medications and her mental state improved, and
Speaker 1: that allowed her to return to a normal life. And
Speaker 1: she eventually gave to her fifth child and everything seemed okay.
Speaker 1: But shortly after that birth, her father died and that
Speaker 1: was very hard on her, and it took her hard
Speaker 1: won composure and it smashed it. She stopped taking her
Speaker 1: antipsychotic medications. So one morning in June, Rusty left the
Speaker 1: house for work, which left Andrea alone with the children.
Speaker 1: Now this was directly against the advice of their psychiatrist,
Speaker 1: who advised him to never leave Andrea alone, but Rusty
Speaker 1: assumed he could do it just this once because his
Speaker 1: mother was driving over to the house to take over
Speaker 1: and she would be there in an hour. But it
Speaker 1: was in that hour that Andrea filled the tub and
Speaker 1: murdered all their children. After she laid the children on
Speaker 1: the bed, she called the police, saying she needed an officer.
Speaker 1: She then called Rusty and said to him, it's time.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: What happens when a case like this goes to a
Speaker 1: court of law. In the case of Andrea, both the
Speaker 1: prosecution and the defense agreed that she was mentally ill.
Speaker 1: Why was that straightforward for them to agree because thousands
Speaker 1: of pages documented her successive psychiatric hospitalizations, So neither party
Speaker 1: in the trial raised any question about that her postpartum
Speaker 1: depression had blossomed into a full psychosis, and she had
Speaker 1: been suffering under this for years, and the media attention
Speaker 1: surrounding Andrea's story led the whole nation to consider difficult
Speaker 1: questions about mental illness and criminal responsibility. Was Andrea culpable
Speaker 1: in the normal sense that we think about culpability? What
Speaker 1: is the right thing to do with a person like Andrea?
Speaker 1: On the one hand, her psychology just wasn't like other peoples.
Speaker 2: She was delusional.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, a lot of women faced difficult
Speaker 1: emotions and thoughts after the birth of their children, but
Speaker 1: most of them would come close to imagining an active murder.
Speaker 1: What happened in the trial is that digging into Andrea's
Speaker 1: history revealed even more. She confessed that she had not
Speaker 1: been a good mother to her children, and she worried
Speaker 1: that they weren't developing correctly. Now, she didn't mean this
Speaker 1: in a general way. She meant this in a very
Speaker 1: specific way. In her view, she had been marked by Satan,
Speaker 1: and the only way to save her children from the
Speaker 1: fires of hell was to kill them. If she didn't
Speaker 1: drown them in the tub, she believed they would be
Speaker 1: doomed to eternal punishment. For Andrea, murdering her children was
Speaker 1: the only path to their salvation. So Andrea's lawyers pled
Speaker 1: not guilty by reason of insanity. Now, the idea of
Speaker 1: that plea is that because of her mental illness, she
Speaker 1: is absolved of culpability. That means she's not blameworthy. In
Speaker 1: other words, the plea of not guilty by reason of
Speaker 1: insanity translates to, yes, I committed the crime, but I
Speaker 1: have the mitigating circumstance that I was legally insane.
Speaker 2: This type of.
Speaker 1: Argument is known in the law as an excuse. It's
Speaker 1: a type of defense that reduces the defendant's culpability or blameworthiness.
Speaker 1: So let's dig into this notion of culpability. How do
Speaker 1: we assess culpability? Why do we ever consider anybody culpable?
Speaker 1: To understand this, we need the concept of mensreea, which
Speaker 1: is Latin for guilty mind. So the standard test for
Speaker 1: criminal liability is often summarized in the phrase the act
Speaker 1: does not make the person guilty unless the mind is
Speaker 1: also guilty. In other words, let's say my arm knocks
Speaker 1: somebody off of a cliff. Well, I'm liable for that,
Speaker 1: but I'm not if I have a neurological disorder that
Speaker 1: causes my arm to spasm and sporadically swing around outside
Speaker 1: my control. The act has clearly happened, which is I
Speaker 1: knocked a person off the cliff, but as there was
Speaker 1: no guilty intent behind it, I wouldn't be criminally liable.
Speaker 1: The concept of mens rea allows us to not punish
Speaker 1: people for acts that are committed reflexively. For example, things
Speaker 1: that have come up in courts are a military veteran
Speaker 1: who reflexively shoots an intruder or a man who stabs
Speaker 1: somebody while he is sleepwalking.
Speaker 2: I'm going to do an episode on that legal case soon.
Speaker 1: The idea of doing an act but not having mens
Speaker 1: rea a guilty mind. This also applies if I commit
Speaker 1: a criminal act under duress. For example, if someone holds
Speaker 1: a gun to my head and says, shoplift that laptop,
Speaker 1: or I'm going to kill you. If I shoplift the laptop.
Speaker 1: In that situation, I'm not considered criminally liable because I
Speaker 1: don't have a guilty mind, my life is under threat.
Speaker 1: So with any criminal case, the first question is whether
Speaker 1: the mind is guilty. In other words, is there mensrea.
Speaker 1: If not, the defendant is not criminally liable. Now, as
Speaker 1: it turns out, there are levels of complexity to the
Speaker 1: concept of mensrea. There are levels of having a guilty mind,
Speaker 1: and the legal system concludes that there are different degrees
Speaker 1: to which a person can be liable. So let's dig
Speaker 1: into this for a moment. Let's say that you walk
Speaker 1: into a dark room and you end up destroying a
Speaker 1: bunch of porcelain statues. Now, let's say you knew that
Speaker 1: the room can contained the statues, and your aim was
Speaker 1: to cause as much damage as possible. In this case,
Speaker 1: the intuition of the legal system is that you are
Speaker 1: clearly liable for the damage. But now imagine a second scenario.
Speaker 1: You entered the dark room and you were aware that
Speaker 1: it was full of valuable statuary, but you didn't mean
Speaker 1: to break the statues. You understood that it was almost
Speaker 1: certain that you would break some of them as you
Speaker 1: fumbled around for the switch. In this scenario, we're inclined
Speaker 1: to think that you are guilty, but that you're not
Speaker 1: as culpable as the first scenario, in which you purposely
Speaker 1: sought to cause damage. Now, let's consider a third scenario.
Speaker 1: You skateboard into the dark room knowing that their statuary inside,
Speaker 1: but this time your intention was to ride to the
Speaker 1: light switch without damaging anything. But things went wrong and
Speaker 1: you ended up breaking some statues, despite the fact that
Speaker 1: you had good intentions to only turn on the light switch.
Speaker 1: The act is there, the statues are broken, but the
Speaker 1: mind seems to have had a different level of guilt.
Speaker 1: And let's consider a fourth scenario in which you walked
Speaker 1: into the dark room with no idea that statuary was
Speaker 1: in there. You walked in there with the intention to
Speaker 1: just seek some alone time to meditate because you just
Speaker 1: had an argument with someone and you needed some quiet,
Speaker 1: and you ended up accidentally breaking somebody's statuary. You didn't
Speaker 1: know there was a light switch. You were simply looking
Speaker 1: for somewhere quiet to sit. Now, all these scenarios have
Speaker 1: led to the same outcome. Somebody's beautiful porcelain statues are shattered,
Speaker 1: but the men's rea is not the same. The first
Speaker 1: case exemplifies the legal term of intentional or purposeful. You
Speaker 1: had every objective of going in there and busting up
Speaker 1: those statues. That's the highest level of mensrea. In the
Speaker 1: second case, there was knowledge. You didn't go in there
Speaker 1: intending to break stuff, but you went in knowing this
Speaker 1: was a near certain outcome of your actions. The third
Speaker 1: scenario is classified as recklessness. There was a large risk
Speaker 1: that skateboarding to the light switch was going to break
Speaker 1: some valuable statues, and choosing this action was a real
Speaker 1: difference from how the average person would act. The fourth
Speaker 1: scenario is called negligence, which assumes that a reasonable person
Speaker 1: would have taken more care when entering a dark room
Speaker 1: with which he wasn't familiar. So having a guilty mind
Speaker 1: isn't one thing, but there are different levels. Take homicide
Speaker 1: as an example. The guilty act is something that results
Speaker 1: in the death of another person. But if you intended
Speaker 1: that your conduct would result in the loss of life
Speaker 1: you shoot somebody, that's murder. But if that wasn't your intention,
Speaker 1: if something you did accidentally led to the death of
Speaker 1: somebody else, then it is classified as manslaughter. In a
Speaker 1: typical criminal case, there is a readily identifiable level of mensrea.
Speaker 1: Either someone meant to do it, or they should have
Speaker 1: known better, or they were just being reckless, or they
Speaker 1: were being negligent. That seems to cover most situations, but
Speaker 1: there are a few defenses in which one can argue
Speaker 1: that mensrea is completely absent. One of those is the
Speaker 1: infancy defense. If you are a child, it is assumed
Speaker 1: that you cannot reasonably be held responsible for your actions.
Speaker 1: So many countries have a policy called Doley incapax, which
Speaker 1: just means that if a child is under ten years old,
Speaker 1: he cannot be held legally responsible for his actions because
Speaker 1: he doesn't understand their nature and consequences. So what does
Speaker 1: it mean for Andrea or anyone to plead insanity. It means, yes,
Speaker 1: I committed the act, but the mensrea was not there.
Speaker 1: Because I couldn't understand the nature or consequence of my actions,
Speaker 1: I can't be said to have had a guilty mind.
Speaker 1: Why do we need an insanity defense? Well, in the
Speaker 1: case of Durham versus the United States nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 1: the circuit judges summarized the need this way, quote, the
Speaker 1: legal and moral traditions of the Western world require that
Speaker 1: those who of their own free will and with evil
Speaker 1: intent commit acts which violate the law, shall be criminally
Speaker 1: responsible for those acts.
Speaker 2: Our traditions also require that where such.
Speaker 1: Acts stem from and are the product of a mental
Speaker 1: disease or defect, moral blame shall not attach, and hence
Speaker 1: there will not be criminal responsibility end quote. In other words,
Speaker 1: we need an insanity defense because some people are incapable
Speaker 1: of normal decision making and should not be held morally
Speaker 1: or criminally responsible for their decisions in a mature system
Speaker 1: of criminal law. Everybody agrees on this. Now, in different episodes,
Speaker 1: we'll see what kind of different mental illnesses look like
Speaker 1: that makes somebody incapable of normal decision making. But from
Speaker 1: the legal point of view, this all immediately raises a question,
Speaker 1: how do you know if somebody is just faking it?
Speaker 1: Or a related question, how do you know if someone
Speaker 1: has a mental illness but that's not actually why he
Speaker 1: committed the crime. So these are the tough questions right
Speaker 1: at the intersection of brain science and the legal system. Now,
Speaker 1: as I said at the beginning, insanity is not a
Speaker 1: medical term. There's no way that you can take a
Speaker 1: person into a clinic or laboratory and perform a brain
Speaker 1: scan and confirm ah, yes, that person is insane. It's
Speaker 1: purely a legal term, so how to really think about
Speaker 1: it in a courtroom? This blossomed in the case of
Speaker 1: a young Scottish woodcutter named Daniel McNaughton in January of
Speaker 1: eighteen forty three. McNaughton was suffering from paranoid delusions. He
Speaker 1: publicly griped that he was being followed by spies from
Speaker 1: the Tory political party, and privately he was hearing a
Speaker 1: voice in his head, which he assumed to be the
Speaker 1: voice of God. The voice told him that to end
Speaker 1: this persecution by the Tories, McNaughton should assassinate the British
Speaker 1: Prime Minister, Robert Peel. So McNaughton stalked him for two days,
Speaker 1: and on the third day he waited for Peel to
Speaker 1: emerge from the Prime Minister's office, and then McNaughton followed him,
Speaker 1: and he pulled his gun out from his pocket and
Speaker 1: shot him fatally in the back. McNaught was captured right
Speaker 1: away and charged with murder. It turns out McNaughton had
Speaker 1: made a mistake. It wasn't Robert Peel he had murdered,
Speaker 1: but instead a British civil servant named Edward Drummond. This
Speaker 1: was the first sign to the police that's something was
Speaker 1: a little strange about what was happening here now. At
Speaker 1: McNaughton's trial, the prosecution called two people to the stand,
Speaker 1: his landlady and someone who had known him at school,
Speaker 1: and both testified that he generally seemed of sound mind.
Speaker 1: But then the defense came up. He had a well
Speaker 1: known and eloquent lawyer who argued that McNaughton was clearly deranged.
Speaker 1: He suffered from paranoia, He had delusions of persecution from
Speaker 1: the government. He had command hallucinations, which is where you
Speaker 1: hear a voice in your head that tells you to
Speaker 1: do things. The lawyer brought nine medical experts to the stand,
Speaker 1: all of whom testified that McNaughton.
Speaker 2: Was clearly out of touch with reality.
Speaker 1: The prosecution was unable to muster a single medical experts
Speaker 1: say otherwise, so the jury didn't even need to retire.
Speaker 1: They concluded that Daniel McNaughton was clearly insane, and given
Speaker 1: this conclusion, he was sentenced to commitment for life at
Speaker 1: the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum at Bethlehem Hospital. But many
Speaker 1: British people were displeased with this outcome. Among them was
Speaker 1: a woman whose voice carried the weight of a monarch,
Speaker 1: Queen Victoria. She had previously been the target of assassination attempts,
Speaker 1: and she represented the anger of the public. How can
Speaker 1: one commit murder and just say he's not responsible. He
Speaker 1: ended the life of an innocent man. Shouldn't something be
Speaker 1: done beyond a sentencing to a hospital? And how do
Speaker 1: we know he's not simply faking insanity? So Queen Victoria
Speaker 1: drew upon an ancient right to call the judges to
Speaker 1: explain their reasoning. She put a list of questions to
Speaker 1: the panel of judges, who sat down over the course
Speaker 1: of days and shaped their response to the Queen, and
Speaker 1: in eighteen forty eight this charted the future of the
Speaker 1: insanity defense, leading to the codification of what is known
Speaker 1: as the McNaughton rule.
Speaker 2: What they wrote is this quote.
Speaker 1: To establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it
Speaker 1: must be clearly proved that at the time of committing
Speaker 1: the act, the party accused was laboring under such a
Speaker 1: defective reason from disease of the mind as not to
Speaker 1: know the nature and quality of the act he was doing,
Speaker 1: or if he did know it, that he did not
Speaker 1: know what he was doing was wrong.
Speaker 2: End quote.
Speaker 1: So let zoom in on the important words here. First,
Speaker 1: because of a disease of the mind, a person may
Speaker 1: not understand the nature and quality of his act. For example,
Speaker 1: if I have a mental illness and I pull the
Speaker 1: trigger of a gun, but I have no understanding that
Speaker 1: a bullet is going to come out of the barrel,
Speaker 1: then I don't understand the nature and quality of the
Speaker 1: act I'm committing. And the second issue they point to
Speaker 1: is the inability to distinguish.
Speaker 2: Right from wrong.
Speaker 1: So even if I know how a gun works, it's
Speaker 1: possible that my deficit leaves me unable to distinguish what
Speaker 1: I should do from what I shouldn't. And let me
Speaker 1: just fill this out with another example. Someone could fail
Speaker 1: the first part of the mcnonton test, the cognitive component,
Speaker 1: if they think that they're shooting at a target but
Speaker 1: really it's a person. Or they could fail the second part,
Speaker 1: the moral component, if they knew they were killing a person,
Speaker 1: but they thought that a divine force was commanding them
Speaker 1: to do it. Now, this codification of the insanity defense
Speaker 1: impressed the United States, so within ten years they'd adopted
Speaker 1: it for themselves and This soon formed the foundation of
Speaker 1: the insanity defense.
Speaker 2: Around the world.
Speaker 1: As a result, in a trial in which the insanity
Speaker 1: defense is raised, the job of the court is to
Speaker 1: first assess whether the accused person was suffering from a
Speaker 1: mental disease when the crime was committed. If not, then
Speaker 1: they are criminally responsible. But if the person was subject
Speaker 1: to a mental disease, then two questions are posed. Did
Speaker 1: this person understand the nature and quality of the act
Speaker 1: and could he distinguish right from wrong? So let's zoom
Speaker 1: in on the first step, which is the sanity evaluation.
Speaker 1: Did the person have a mental disease at the time
Speaker 1: of the crime? For the purposes of an insanity defense,
Speaker 1: courts will generally accept a major mental illness, such as
Speaker 1: a psychosis, which is a mental state in which there
Speaker 1: is a loss of contact with reality. Courts are less
Speaker 1: likely to accept, for example, the diagnosis of a personality disorder,
Speaker 1: meaning something about your personality that might inhibit your social progress,
Speaker 1: like obsessive compulsive disorder or narcissistic personality disorder or borderline
Speaker 1: personality disorder. Now, while we're talking about the sanity evaluation,
Speaker 1: you've surely heard the term psycho But what exactly does
Speaker 1: that mean? Does it describe someone who is separated from
Speaker 1: reality or does it instead describe an aggressive person who
Speaker 1: has no regard for other people's feelings. Okay, so this
Speaker 1: is a trick question. Psycho is a meaningless term invented
Speaker 1: by Hollywood. In the movie Psycho, they were referring to
Speaker 1: a psychopath, also known as a sociopath. And I'll be
Speaker 1: doing an episode soon on psychopathy people like Ted Bundy,
Speaker 1: But somebody with a psychosis, which is what we're talking
Speaker 1: about today, has an abnormal condition of the mind that
Speaker 1: separates them from reality. And it's a generic psychiatric term
Speaker 1: in the same way that we talk in medicine about
Speaker 1: somebody having a fever, which can be caused by many
Speaker 1: underlying conditions. So psychopathy like Ted Bundy and psychosis like
Speaker 1: Andrea Yates, these are both men descriptors, but their world's apart.
Speaker 1: Will meet psychopaths in future episodes, but for now, we're
Speaker 1: going to move into the world of psychosis. People suffering
Speaker 1: with a psychosis have this lack of contact with reality,
Speaker 1: and this typically translates into wildly incorrect ideas about events
Speaker 1: going on around them or about their self identity. They
Speaker 1: might have delusions like I'm President Biden's special advisor or
Speaker 1: Eyeshot Tupac. A person with a psychosis often perceives things
Speaker 1: that aren't there. They report things like, when I'm not looking,
Speaker 1: everybody sticks their tongues out at me, and when I
Speaker 1: whirl around to look, they all stop. A lot of
Speaker 1: features tend to go along with the psychosis, like confusion, depression,
Speaker 1: abnormal displays of emotion, disorganized thoughts and speech, and sometimes
Speaker 1: suicidal thoughts. A psychosis can come with mania or false
Speaker 1: beliefs or mistaken perceptions, and often paranoia.
Speaker 2: And pretty commonly a person hears.
Speaker 1: Hallucinatory voices and sometimes those voices will seem to tell
Speaker 1: him to do something. That's the command hallucination. So why
Speaker 1: does psychosis matter for the legal system. Well, if you're
Speaker 1: disconnected from reality when you commit a crime, you were
Speaker 1: not operating with a guilty mind, a conniving, planning guilty mind. So,
Speaker 1: for example, given Daniel McNaughton's deep psychosis, the British judges
Speaker 1: found it difficult to insist that he had a guilty
Speaker 1: mind in the way that they normally see with other people.
Speaker 1: So let's return to Andrea Yates. How should a juror
Speaker 1: analyze her plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.
Speaker 1: In her trial, a picture of mental illness came into
Speaker 1: sharp focus. Her illness had been documented in thousands of pages.
Speaker 1: She had been hospitalized four times, and she'd been diagnosed
Speaker 1: by independent psychiatrists with postpartum depression and psychosist She had
Speaker 1: been helped by medication for the psychosis, but when she
Speaker 1: stopped taking the pills, her mental situation got worse, and
Speaker 1: things got even worse after the death of her father. Moreover,
Speaker 1: the jury learns that she had a spiritual mentor, a
Speaker 1: guy named Michael Warniki, who was a fire and brimstone
Speaker 1: minister who insisted to his congregants that any fault of
Speaker 1: the children is the fault of the mother. And of
Speaker 1: special note, he insisted that children will burn in hell
Speaker 1: if they're not raised correctly by the mother. Now, Andrea's
Speaker 1: family was worried about her connection with this preacher. She
Speaker 1: seemed to hang on his every word. This guy was
Speaker 1: really charismatic, and Yates later told the jail psychiatrist quote,
Speaker 1: it was the seventh deadly in My children weren't righteous,
Speaker 1: They stumbled because I was evil the way I was
Speaker 1: raising them. They could never be saved. They were doomed
Speaker 1: to perish in the fires of hell end quote. So
Speaker 1: what happened at the trial, Well, the prosecution enlisted a
Speaker 1: famous psychiatrist, again named Park Deets. He had previously served
Speaker 1: as a psychiatrist in a whole bunch of famous trials
Speaker 1: like those of the unibomber and John Hinckley and Susan Smith,
Speaker 1: so his presence was very weighty there. And Deets argued
Speaker 1: that Andrea Yates was not insane under Texas law. So
Speaker 1: he said, essentially, yes, she has a history of mental illness,
Speaker 1: but the important question is whether she was able to
Speaker 1: distinguish right from wrong, good from evil when she committed
Speaker 1: her crimes. So in court, this is how the dialogue went.
Speaker 1: Deets said, before you did it, did you think it
Speaker 1: was wrong? And Yeates said no. And he said why
Speaker 1: did you not think it wrong? And Yates said, if
Speaker 1: I didn't do it, they would be tormented by Satan.
Speaker 1: It was a bad choice. I shouldn't have done it.
Speaker 1: There was distress, but I still felt that I had
Speaker 1: to do it. Indeeds said, as you drowned each one,
Speaker 1: did you think it was the right thing? To be doing,
Speaker 1: and Yets nodded her head in affirmation. So Deets was
Speaker 1: working with this line of questioning to establish that this
Speaker 1: was not a psychotic state but instead part of a
Speaker 1: criminal plan. He said later quote, if it's true that
Speaker 1: she believed that killing the children would save them, then
Speaker 1: why would she not want it to happen. She would
Speaker 1: want to talk about it so it came true and
Speaker 1: the children would be saved. So I concluded at that
Speaker 1: point that she's keeping it secret. She knows that other
Speaker 1: people are going to stop her, that it's wrong, that
Speaker 1: it's a bad idea.
Speaker 2: She admits that she knows people will stop her. End quote.
Speaker 1: In other words, he prodded her over this issue. Why
Speaker 1: did she suffer the angst over doing it? If she
Speaker 1: had really believed that drowning her children was the right
Speaker 1: thing to do, then she should proceed without delay. Instead,
Speaker 1: she waited until her husband left for work, and then
Speaker 1: she started the bathtub. Afterwards, she felt remorse about the crime,
Speaker 1: but if she had felt she successfully saved her children
Speaker 1: from eternal damnation, she might feel gratified.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Dietz's arguments were compelling, but did they hold water well.
Speaker 1: One difficulty is that people can be internally conflicted, and
Speaker 1: I've done a different episode about the team of rivals
Speaker 1: inside your head. So imagine that your horse breaks its
Speaker 1: leg and you have to shoot it. You may love
Speaker 1: the horse and feel anguish over having to shoot it,
Speaker 1: while still believing that the act has to be done.
Speaker 1: The fact that you are conflicted doesn't mean that you're
Speaker 1: lying when you say that it's the right thing to do.
Speaker 1: But more on that later. For now, what I want
Speaker 1: to note is that Dietz's line of questioning came down
Speaker 1: to what's sometimes known as the cop at the elbow test.
Speaker 2: Would she have done.
Speaker 1: This if a police officer were standing there at her side?
Speaker 1: If she wouldn't have done it, then the jury should
Speaker 1: conclude that Andrea knew what society considered right and wrong,
Speaker 1: irrespective of her internal sense of it. And Deets argued
Speaker 1: that Andrea indeed knew right from wrong. She contemplated murdering
Speaker 1: the children for two years, but stopped herself after the
Speaker 1: horrific act. Guilt caused her to cover the bodies on
Speaker 1: the bed. She herself called the police to be arrested.
Speaker 1: She felt that the death penalty was a punishment she deserved.
Speaker 1: And in fact she requested it. Her religious position told
Speaker 1: her that she needed to burn and suffer about this.
Speaker 1: She believed that God would judge her actions badly. So
Speaker 1: Deets raised all these points to argue that she clearly
Speaker 1: knew right from wrong and therefore was not legally insane.
Speaker 1: And Dietz's potent arguments also had an unexpected twist. He
Speaker 1: pointed out that Yates got the idea of drowning her
Speaker 1: children in the bathtub from an episode of the television
Speaker 1: show Law and Order, a show on which Deets happened
Speaker 1: to be a consultant. In the episode, he told the
Speaker 1: jury a woman drowns her children in the bathtub and
Speaker 1: was found not guilty by reason of insanity. And Rusty
Speaker 1: Yates indeed testified on her questioning that Andrea Yates watched
Speaker 1: Law and Order often. So this point landed on the jury,
Speaker 1: making them question whether the insanity defense really applied to Andrea.
Speaker 1: But something wasn't normal about Andrea's thinking. I mean, after all,
Speaker 1: despite the common challenges of motherhood and concerns about spiritual waywardness,
Speaker 1: it's astoundingly rare for a.
Speaker 2: Mother to murder her children.
Speaker 1: So the legal question and then shifts. What if Yates
Speaker 1: actually did know right from wrong but was unable to
Speaker 1: stop herself, would discount for the insanity defense. Now this
Speaker 1: is a cliffhanger because I'm not going to tell you
Speaker 1: what happened until next week, and at that point we'll
Speaker 1: tie this into what the insanity defense has to do
Speaker 1: with a United States congressman who committed murder, what it
Speaker 1: has to do with Loraina Bobbitt, who emasculated her husband,
Speaker 1: and what it has to do with John Hinckley who
Speaker 1: tried to assassinate President Reagan.
Speaker 2: All of this points to the complex question.
Speaker 1: Of how we as a society need to think about
Speaker 1: drawing a bright line in the sand between insane and
Speaker 1: not insane, which might seem like a simple determination, but
Speaker 1: it's actually incredibly complexified by the fact that there is
Speaker 1: no natural line in biology. The fact is that science
Speaker 1: and the law are strange bedfellows. The legal system is
Speaker 1: forced to be categorical. The judge and jury are tasked
Speaker 1: with deciding whether a defendant is or is not insane.
Speaker 1: But neuroscience sees that brains can be very different from
Speaker 1: one another, and it's usually on a smooth spectrum, such
Speaker 1: that someone might be more or less separated from reality,
Speaker 1: and it's often not such an easy call to determine
Speaker 1: what to do. So what is the right thing to
Speaker 1: do here? And what were the surprises that came out
Speaker 1: next in the trial of Andrea Yates?
Speaker 2: Tune in next week to find out.
Speaker 1: Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
Speaker 1: and to find further reading. Send me an email at
Speaker 1: podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or discussions, and
Speaker 1: I'll make sporadic episodes in which I address these.
Speaker 2: Until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.