Speaker 1: Is there such a thing as temporary insanity? Is there
Speaker 1: such a thing as the twinkie defense, or using pre
Speaker 1: menstrual syndrome as a criminal defense? And what does this
Speaker 1: tell us about the differences between brains yours and other people's,
Speaker 1: or even between yours one day and yours the next day.
Speaker 1: How does the legal system wrestle with the science, and
Speaker 1: how are the law and the science like two different
Speaker 1: people with very different ways of looking at the world.
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 we believe the things we do and behave in
Speaker 1: the ways that we do, and why there's such a
Speaker 1: variety in the ways that people see the world, and
Speaker 1: how we try to structure legal systems around that fact. Now,
Speaker 1: today we're picking up on the trial of Andrea Yates,
Speaker 1: who was a young woman in Houston, Texas, who had
Speaker 1: five beautiful children, and one day she murdered them one
Speaker 1: by one by drowning them in the bathtub. Now, if
Speaker 1: you haven't heard the previous episode, please go back to
Speaker 1: that one to get the full background on that story.
Speaker 1: Andrea was suffering from a psychosis, which is a mental
Speaker 1: disorder characterized by a disconnection from reality, and at her trial,
Speaker 1: her lawyers pled the insanity defense, or specifically, not guilty
Speaker 1: by reason of insanity. Now as a reminder, the prosecution
Speaker 1: hired on a psychiatrist who said, yes, Andrea clearly has
Speaker 1: mental troubles, but I think she did this particular act
Speaker 1: more purposefully because if she was unable to distinguish right
Speaker 1: from wrong, which is one of the prongs of the
Speaker 1: insanity defense, then she wouldn't have made sure she waited
Speaker 1: until her husband was gone before doing it, and she
Speaker 1: wouldn't have suffered regret. And Deet said, there was an
Speaker 1: episode of Law and Order, which is a show that
Speaker 1: Andrea watched regularly, in which a woman drowns her children
Speaker 1: in the bathtub so she can be free to be
Speaker 1: with her lover. So Andrea's case brings to the forefront
Speaker 1: some of the deep questions about the insanity defense. How
Speaker 1: do we know when we should judge someone's actions to
Speaker 1: stem from a mental disorder like a psychosis, versus judging
Speaker 1: the person to just be more devious? We can't really
Speaker 1: know what is happening inside someone's head. So how do
Speaker 1: we make these judgments as a society, and how do
Speaker 1: we canonize these decisions into law. I mentioned in the
Speaker 1: last episode that in eighteen forty three a Scottish man
Speaker 1: named Daniel McNaughton suffered from a deep psychosis and he
Speaker 1: shot and killed a man that he erroneously thought was
Speaker 1: the British Prime Minister, and a court of judges sat
Speaker 1: down and defined what came to be known as the
Speaker 1: McNaughton rules, which essentially said that if you want to
Speaker 1: establish an insanity defense, you have to clearly prove that
Speaker 1: at the time of committing the act you had a
Speaker 1: disease of the mind such that you didn't understand the
Speaker 1: nature and quality of the act, like if you pull
Speaker 1: a trigger a bullet comes out, or you didn't know
Speaker 1: that what you were doing was wrong. In other words,
Speaker 1: you were unable to distinguish between right and wrong. Okay,
Speaker 1: So these McNaughton rules caught on in England and America
Speaker 1: and around the world. But in the late nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: legal scholars began to worry that maybe the McNaughton rules
Speaker 1: were too narrow. Why because These rules only ask whether
Speaker 1: a person knows the difference between right and wrong and
Speaker 1: understands the nature and consequences of the actions, and that
Speaker 1: invited concerns for psychiatrists and lawyers. First, can a psychiatrists
Speaker 1: really testify to absolute knowledge of right versus wrong or
Speaker 1: about absolute freedom of choice? And even if they can
Speaker 1: in extreme cases, the rule only allows for total incapacity.
Speaker 1: But what if you're just a little confused about the
Speaker 1: difference between right and wrong? And what if you know
Speaker 1: the difference just fine, except for during a small window
Speaker 1: of time. So let's dig into that. On a February
Speaker 1: day in eighteen fifty nine, there was a United States
Speaker 1: congressman named Daniel Sickles who murdered the US attorney for
Speaker 1: the District of Columbia, a guy named Philip Barton Key.
Speaker 1: Sickles caught a glimpse of Key outside his house, and
Speaker 1: he furiously chased Key into Lafayette Square, across the street
Speaker 1: from the White House, and he shot him in the groin,
Speaker 1: reportedly yelling quote, you villain, you have dishonored my house
Speaker 1: and you must die. Sickles then fatally shot Key in
Speaker 1: the chest as he begged for his life, So what
Speaker 1: led up to that? Well, before these events in Lafayette Square,
Speaker 1: Sickles had been informed by a friend that his wife,
Speaker 1: Teresa was having an affair with Key Now. Sickles lawyer
Speaker 1: Edward Stayton, who went on to become Lincoln's Secretary of War,
Speaker 1: painted Sickles as a betrayed spouse driven crazy by grief
Speaker 1: and what he claimed was quote temporary insanity. For the
Speaker 1: first time in the United States history, this plea was successful,
Speaker 1: and Sickles was declared not guilty. In the United States,
Speaker 1: a temporary insanity defense can be raised to argue that
Speaker 1: a defendant is not responsible for their actions because a
Speaker 1: severe mental disease or defect prevented them from appreciating the
Speaker 1: wrongness of their acts at the time. So different jurisdictions
Speaker 1: treat this differently, but the standard from the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: of Iowa states that quote in order to be an
Speaker 1: excuse and defense for a criminal act, the person accused
Speaker 1: and who claims temporary insanity as a defense must prove
Speaker 1: that the crime charged was caused by mental disease or
Speaker 1: unsoundness which dethroned, overcame, or swayed her reason and judgment.
Speaker 1: With respect to that act which destroyed her power rationally
Speaker 1: to comprehend the nature and consequences of that act end quote.
Speaker 1: So the temporary insanity defense often gets linked with intoxication,
Speaker 1: and in certain jurisdictions, intoxication can be grounds for a
Speaker 1: reduced penalty because of temporary insanity. Now, Sickles act as
Speaker 1: an example of what we commonly refer to today as a
Speaker 1: crime of passion. Under this kind of interpretation, Sickles would
Speaker 1: have been said to have been experiencing extreme emotional disturbance,
Speaker 1: and his crime would likely be reduced from murder to
Speaker 1: voluntary manslaughter. Why because crimes of passion are not punished
Speaker 1: to the same degree. Because there are certain circumstances under
Speaker 1: which we think it's reasonable for someone in extreme emotional
Speaker 1: distress to lose their self control. While we don't condone
Speaker 1: the crime, we intuitively think that a person acting during
Speaker 1: a moment of extreme emotional distress is less culpable than
Speaker 1: the cool headed and calculating criminal. Unlike the insanity defense,
Speaker 1: extreme emotional distress doesn't absolve the defendant of all culpability,
Speaker 1: but it can lessen the degree of the crime. Now,
Speaker 1: you may have heard the term twinkie defense, and this
Speaker 1: is used to describe a seemingly absurd, yet somehow successful
Speaker 1: legal defense, and what this originates from is the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine trial of Dan White for the deaths of
Speaker 1: the San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk,
Speaker 1: and the term twinkie defense refers to this commonly held
Speaker 1: but actually inaccurate belief that White's lawyers successfully argued that
Speaker 1: his consumption of Twinkies put enough sugar into his body
Speaker 1: to send him into a murderous state. In actuality, White's
Speaker 1: lawyers argued diminished capacity from depression and his sugary diet
Speaker 1: only played a small role in explaining his mental decline. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: the term twinkie defense continues to be applied to legal
Speaker 1: defenses that seem ludicrous. Now there are many kinds of
Speaker 1: defenses that people try, and sometimes they're successful. A woman
Speaker 1: in Virginia in nineteen ninety one argued that pre menstrual
Speaker 1: syndrome caused her erratic behavior, and she was able to
Speaker 1: avoid being found guilty of driving under the influence this way,
Speaker 1: and a decade before that, two women in England were
Speaker 1: similarly able to reduce their criminal responsibility from murder to
Speaker 1: manslaughter based on a pre menstrual syndrome defense. Okay, so
Speaker 1: these are the concerns that people have about whether insanity
Speaker 1: can be temporary or not. But let's zoom back out
Speaker 1: to the really big picture about the McNaughton rules and
Speaker 1: what the problems are. The bigger problem with the mcnotton
Speaker 1: rule is that it's too narrowly cognitive. You might know
Speaker 1: the difference between right and wrong, and you might know
Speaker 1: the nature and consequences of your action. But what if
Speaker 1: that's not the problem. What if the real problem is
Speaker 1: one of the In other words, your cognitive reasoning is fine,
Speaker 1: but you can't stop yourself. In later episodes, we'll see
Speaker 1: a lot of examples of impaired volition. For example, there's
Speaker 1: a disease known as frontotemporal lowbar degeneration, where people can
Speaker 1: know perfectly well the difference between right and wrong, but
Speaker 1: they are totally unable to stop their impulsive behavior. They'll
Speaker 1: expose themselves in public, they'll urinate in public, they'll touch
Speaker 1: people inappropriately. They'll shoplift, they'll reach into garbage cans and
Speaker 1: eat food out of it. They'll run red lights, they'll
Speaker 1: curse in public. They just do whatever they want. If
Speaker 1: you ask such a person is shoplifting right or wrong,
Speaker 1: they're perfectly capable of verifying that they're not supposed to
Speaker 1: do it. If you ask you understand when you steal
Speaker 1: it costs someone else money, they'll genuinely agree that. They understand.
Speaker 1: They can discriminate right from wrong, and they understand the
Speaker 1: nature and consequences of their actions. They just can't do
Speaker 1: anything about it. This comes up not only in cases
Speaker 1: of degenerative brain disease, but also in cases of traumatic
Speaker 1: brain injury or from brain disorders that people are sometimes
Speaker 1: born with. In all these cases, a person can understand
Speaker 1: the difference between right and wrong, and they simply don't
Speaker 1: have the proper brain function to stop their transgressions. So
Speaker 1: by the eighteen eighties, scholars wondered whether the legal definition
Speaker 1: of insanity would need to evolve, and to that end,
Speaker 1: an additional prong was added to the insanity defense in
Speaker 1: some jurisdictions, and this was the concept of an irresistible impulse.
Speaker 1: Was the defendant able to control his behavior at the
Speaker 1: time of the offense. I'll give you an example of
Speaker 1: this from eighteen eighty five, a woman named Nancy Parsons
Speaker 1: believed that she knew why she had been sick and
Speaker 1: in bad health for a long time, and her assessment
Speaker 1: was that her husband, Bennett possessed supernatural powers that caused
Speaker 1: her illness and put her at risk of death. So
Speaker 1: she encouraged her daughter to shoot and kill Bennett. Now,
Speaker 1: both Nancy and her daughter sought to employ the insanity defense.
Speaker 1: Nancy was experiencing a quote insane delusion and the daughter
Speaker 1: quote was at the time of said killing and always
Speaker 1: had been an idiot. Now, applying the McNaught rules, the
Speaker 1: jury initially found Nancy and her daughter guilty of murder
Speaker 1: in the second degree. On appeal, however, the state Supreme
Speaker 1: Court reversed the decision and added a component to the
Speaker 1: insanity defense. Someone is not guilty if she was subject
Speaker 1: to quote the dress of such mental disease that she
Speaker 1: had lost the power to choose between right and wrong,
Speaker 1: and her free agency was at the time to destroyed.
Speaker 1: So this was not about knowing the difference between right
Speaker 1: and wrong. Instead, it was about losing the power to
Speaker 1: choose between right and wrong. A person has an impulse
Speaker 1: to act that cannot be resisted. In this way, the
Speaker 1: additional prong makes the McNaughton test slightly broader, although the
Speaker 1: legal defense still has to demonstrate that the crime was
Speaker 1: connected with a mental disease and was directly the product
Speaker 1: of it. So to understand this notion of an irresistible impulse,
Speaker 1: consider a case that you probably remember. LORRAINA. Bobbitt. In
Speaker 1: the wee hours of June twenty third, nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 1: she pulled back the covers on her sleeping husband, John
Speaker 1: Wayne Bobbitt, and cut off his penis with an eight
Speaker 1: inch kitchen knife. She fled from their apartment in her car,
Speaker 1: and she tossed the severed organ into a field. Now
Speaker 1: what led to this moment? At trial, her defence team
Speaker 1: alleged that she had spent the years of their marriage
Speaker 1: being repeatedly raped and beaten and sodomized by her husband,
Speaker 1: and this was verified by expert witnesses on both the
Speaker 1: prosecution and the defense, who validated that she quote lived
Speaker 1: in constant fear of him. In light of this, her
Speaker 1: lawyers argued that she had an irresistible impulse. After many
Speaker 1: hours of deliberation, the jury found lorrain and Bobbitt not
Speaker 1: guilty by reason of temporary insanity based on their conclusion
Speaker 1: that she was unable to resist her impulse to wound John.
Speaker 1: In this way, she was not held liable for her assault. Instead,
Speaker 1: she was sent for a forty five day evaluation at
Speaker 1: a local state hospital. So by the end of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century it seemed that bases were covered with the
Speaker 1: McNaughton rules plus the notion of an irresistible impulse, But
Speaker 1: legal experts agonized that this version of insanity might still
Speaker 1: be too narrow because the rules only allowed for total incapacity,
Speaker 1: they were insensitive to partial problems, and many people on
Speaker 1: trial were seen to be in a gray area in between,
Speaker 1: not completely unaware of right and wrong, or maybe they
Speaker 1: were subject to impulses that might not be one hundred
Speaker 1: percent irresistible. In the late nineteen forties, there was a
Speaker 1: young man named Monty Durham who had years of petty
Speaker 1: crimes and mental illness, and this familiarized Durham with both
Speaker 1: the criminal justice system and the state asylum. So in
Speaker 1: July of nineteen fifty one, Durham was convicted of housebreaking
Speaker 1: in Washington, d c. And he appealed his case and
Speaker 1: as a result, a new test emerged in nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 1: which is called the Durham rule, and the idea was
Speaker 1: to broaden the mcnot rules such that now the task
Speaker 1: was merely to conclude whether a defendant's criminal act was
Speaker 1: quote the product of mental disease or mental defect. If
Speaker 1: it was, then he would not be criminally responsible. But
Speaker 1: there was a problem here. How do you ever prove
Speaker 1: that some act was the product of a disease or
Speaker 1: a defect. One might claim the disease was related to
Speaker 1: the act, But what portion of the disease came from you?
Speaker 1: And what portion from the disease? But that wasn't even
Speaker 1: the big problem. The big problem was who gets to
Speaker 1: decide if an act was the product of a disease.
Speaker 1: So the Durham rule shifted the power to psychiatrists who
Speaker 1: gave expert testimony. A psychiatrist would testify whether the act
Speaker 1: was the product of a mental disease, and the jury,
Speaker 1: instead of making decisions on their own, was in a
Speaker 1: position of just having to accept the psychiatrist's testimony. In
Speaker 1: other words, starting in nineteen fifty four, the power was
Speaker 1: in the physician's expert testimony instead of in the juror's hands. Now,
Speaker 1: at first blush, that doesn't seem like a problem, because,
Speaker 1: after all, the psychiatrists are the experts. But the problem
Speaker 1: was that their testimony could be ambiguous and two experts
Speaker 1: could contradict one another. Imagine the defense pulls up their
Speaker 1: favorite psychiatrists who asserts that mister Smith has clear evidence
Speaker 1: of a mental illness, and then the prosecution puts up
Speaker 1: their psychiatrists who says the opposite. Suddenly, the fact finding
Speaker 1: job of the jury becomes complexified. Relying on expert witness
Speaker 1: testimony turned out to be much more problematic than they
Speaker 1: had originally envisioned. So the Durham rule held sway in
Speaker 1: US Corps for eighteen years. But then one night at
Speaker 1: a party, a man named Archie Brauner got into a fight.
Speaker 1: He left bleeding and returned with a gun, and after
Speaker 1: shooting and killing a man, Bronner was arrested. The court
Speaker 1: tested for insanity using a standard that's now known as
Speaker 1: the Bronner rule, and the rule states a person is
Speaker 1: not responsible for criminal conduct if, at the time of
Speaker 1: the action, as a result of mental disease or defect,
Speaker 1: he or she lacks the substantial capacity either to appreciate
Speaker 1: the criminality of his conduct, or to conform his conduct
Speaker 1: to the requirements of the law. The key thing about
Speaker 1: the Bronner rule is that expert witnesses no longer decided
Speaker 1: whether the crime resulted from a mental defect. Instead, that
Speaker 1: was now up to the jurors. If a defendant wanted
Speaker 1: to claim that he wasn't liable for a crime, his
Speaker 1: argument had to meet two prongs. He has to lack
Speaker 1: the capacity to appreciate that his conduct was wrongful, and
Speaker 1: he has to lack the capacity to conform his conduct.
Speaker 1: So why have I told you this whole history of
Speaker 1: the insanity defense. It's because this illustrates a really key point,
Speaker 1: which is that it's not easy to take something as
Speaker 1: complex as mental life and reduce it cleanly into a
Speaker 1: yes or no decision in the courtroom. The endeavor to
Speaker 1: build the right definition relies on a collaboration of psychiatry
Speaker 1: and legal scholarship and the public, and because of the
Speaker 1: inherently diversified goals, the road to definitive rules didn't even
Speaker 1: end with the Broader rule. Over a century after McNaughton
Speaker 1: committed his homicide, there was a troubled twenty five year
Speaker 1: old American named John who was developing an increasing obsession
Speaker 1: with the actress Jody Foster, and so he repeatedly watched
Speaker 1: this movie Taxi Driver, in which the young Foster played
Speaker 1: a twelve year old prostitute. And in the movie, the
Speaker 1: protagonist Travis Bickle, who is played by Robert de Niro,
Speaker 1: hatches a plot to assassinate a politician for public admiration.
Speaker 1: So John, with his unshakable love for Jody Foster, began
Speaker 1: to send letters to her and stalk her, and he
Speaker 1: somehow got a hold of her phone number, and he
Speaker 1: rang her several times, and every time she hung up.
Speaker 1: And he wrote in his final letter to her, quote,
Speaker 1: as you very well know by now, I love you
Speaker 1: very much. The past seven months, I have left you
Speaker 1: dozens of poems, letters, and messages in the faint hope
Speaker 1: that you would develop an interest in me. Although we
Speaker 1: talked on the phone a couple of times, I never
Speaker 1: had the nerve to simply approach you and introduce myself.
Speaker 1: Desides my shyness, I honestly did not wish to bother
Speaker 1: you with my constant presence. I know that many messages
Speaker 1: left at your door and in your mailbox were a nuisance,
Speaker 1: but I felt it was the most painless way for
Speaker 1: me to express my love to you. I will admit
Speaker 1: to you that the reason I'm going ahead with this
Speaker 1: attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer
Speaker 1: to impress you. End quote. Now. The attempt he's referring
Speaker 1: to there was the assassination of President Ronald Reagan. So
Speaker 1: on March thirtieth, nineteen eighty one, John Hinckley fired six
Speaker 1: shots as the president and his entourage exited the Hilton
Speaker 1: Hotel in Washington, d c. None of Hinckley's bullets directly
Speaker 1: hit Reagan, but one ricochet off the limousine and hit
Speaker 1: the president under his left armpit, and three other people
Speaker 1: in the party were wounded, including the Press secretary James Brady,
Speaker 1: who spent the rest of his life partially paralyzed on
Speaker 1: the left side of his body. Now, this act of
Speaker 1: senseless violence led to a national uproar, people thirsted for
Speaker 1: a swift and effective punishment for Hinckley. The federal trial
Speaker 1: was quickly set into motion, and at the end the
Speaker 1: jury gathered in their room with their coffee cups and
Speaker 1: spent a long time deliberating over everything they had seen,
Speaker 1: and they agreed that Hinckley was indeed deeply psychotic. He
Speaker 1: was disconnected from reality and was unable to conform to
Speaker 1: the requirements of the law. So on June twenty first,
Speaker 1: eighty two, Hinckley was declared not guilty by reason of insanity.
Speaker 1: But this pill was a jagged one for the public
Speaker 1: to swallow, just as in Queen Victoria's Day, which I
Speaker 1: talked about in the last episode, the air was filled
Speaker 1: with outcries and citizens had just witnessed an assassination attempt
Speaker 1: on their president, and they were enraged. They felt that
Speaker 1: they were being denied their right to see punishment. After all,
Speaker 1: people asked, how do we know if Hinckley truly had
Speaker 1: an impulse that was irresistible or simply an impulse not resisted.
Speaker 1: All this national anger sparked action at the congressional level. Lawmakers,
Speaker 1: responding to all this ire came together to pass the
Speaker 1: Insanity Defense Reform Act of nineteen eighty four. The act
Speaker 1: stripped the insanity defense back to a simpler version. A
Speaker 1: defendant could now escape criminalizability only if he was unable
Speaker 1: to appreciate the nature and quality, or the wrongfulness of
Speaker 1: the Act. In other words, it got rid of the
Speaker 1: irresistible impulse prong. It brought it back to the McNaughton rules.
Speaker 1: It got rid of the consideration of whether you were
Speaker 1: able to appropriately conform your behavior. All that mattered now
Speaker 1: is whether a defendant could appreciate right from wrong. If
Speaker 1: there was some reason he couldn't help himself, from frontal
Speaker 1: low problems to psychosis, he was out of luck and surfing.
Speaker 1: On top of this wave of national anger, Congress went
Speaker 1: even further beyond removing this volitional component. They also added
Speaker 1: conditions to raise the bar for the insanity defense. They
Speaker 1: specified that the defendant has to suffer from a severe
Speaker 1: mental illness, and the defendant has to prove by clear
Speaker 1: and convincing evidence the alleged insanity, which was higher than
Speaker 1: before which was just a preponderance of evidence. So, in
Speaker 1: addition to raising the standard of proof, the Act further
Speaker 1: complicated things by shifting the burden of proof from the
Speaker 1: prosecution to the defense. In other words, before Hankley, the
Speaker 1: prosecution had to prove that the defendant was not insane,
Speaker 1: but now the defendant had to prove that he was insane.
Speaker 1: And part of the difficulty here is that a. The
Speaker 1: central feature of psychosis is a lack of insight. So
Speaker 1: consider the unibomber ted Kaczynski, who killed three people and
Speaker 1: injured twenty three others by sending them explosives in the mail.
Speaker 1: Although he clearly had paranoid schizophrenia, he took offense to
Speaker 1: any suggestions or implications that he was mentally ill. He
Speaker 1: wouldn't follow his lawyer's suggestion to take the insanity plea
Speaker 1: because he was angered that anyone would be suggesting that
Speaker 1: something was wrong with his thinking. So a lack of
Speaker 1: insight is a hallmark characteristic of people with psychosis. They
Speaker 1: have no discernment that something is strange about their behavior. Instead,
Speaker 1: they believe they're seeing the world correctly while others are not.
Speaker 1: So it's no surprise that many defendants have a mental
Speaker 1: illness but will not take an insanity plea because they
Speaker 1: see a full justification for their actions, whether that was
Speaker 1: divine commandment or revenge for imagined political wrongdoings, or other
Speaker 1: fantastical reasons. So I'm telling you all this to make
Speaker 1: it clear that the legal definition of insanity is more
Speaker 1: complicated than the road which began with Daniel McNaughton. In America,
Speaker 1: if a defendant suffers from a mental disease, you might
Speaker 1: have four different tests used in different places, and cases
Speaker 1: can conclude very differently depending on which test is employed.
Speaker 1: Some jurisdictions still use the McNaughton rule. One still uses
Speaker 1: the Durham rule almost half free line on the broader rule.
Speaker 1: The Federal Core and several other jurisdictions employ the Insanity
Speaker 1: Defense Reform Act, and the state by state bespoke nature
Speaker 1: doesn't even end there. In nineteen ninety five, Kansas abolished
Speaker 1: the affirmative insanity defense and established what's known as the
Speaker 1: mensrea approach. Under this approach, mental illness is only considered
Speaker 1: to the extent that it prevents the defendant from having
Speaker 1: the required mensrea or guilty mind. For example, if a
Speaker 1: defendant knowingly commits a crime but couldn't know what she
Speaker 1: was doing because of her mental illness, that would satisfy
Speaker 1: the mens rea approach. The defendants act to judge the
Speaker 1: wrongfulness of her acts just doesn't matter. So Kansas's decision
Speaker 1: rose to the US Supreme Court in twenty twenty after
Speaker 1: a guy named James Craig Kaylor killed his wife and
Speaker 1: two teenage daughters, and his wife's grandmother. He had a
Speaker 1: major depression an obsessive personality disorder, but he was not
Speaker 1: allowed to use an affirmative insanity defense and he was
Speaker 1: given a death sentence. So his team appealed to the
Speaker 1: Kansas Supreme Court, and they argued that the prosecution had
Speaker 1: violated his right to a fair trial by denying him
Speaker 1: the right to leverage the insanity defense. But Kansas said
Speaker 1: that they were within their rights to craft their insanity
Speaker 1: defense however they chose. So this went all the way
Speaker 1: up to the US Supreme Court, and his council argued
Speaker 1: that a state government shouldn't be able to impose cruel
Speaker 1: and unusual punishment, and a lack of insanity defense fit
Speaker 1: this description. Additionally, they argued that Kansas's approach violated his
Speaker 1: due process, which calls for the fair treatment by the
Speaker 1: judicial system. They argued that ignoring this question of could
Speaker 1: you distinguish right from wrong equated to an unfair system.
Speaker 1: So the US Supreme Court affirmed that Kansas was not
Speaker 1: required to take on in the sanity defense that depended
Speaker 1: on a defendant's ability to recognize that their crime was
Speaker 1: morally wrong. In other words, the court concluded that it
Speaker 1: was the state's decision and that decisions surrounding criminal liability
Speaker 1: and mental illness were left to them. So, as of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, there are four states that have committed to
Speaker 1: the men's rea approach rather than a traditional insanity defense.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing, there's no single right answer that everyone
Speaker 1: should use, and this underscores the difficulty, both legal and psychiatric,
Speaker 1: of deciding who is criminally liable and who is not.
Speaker 1: And this is not just a current challenge. It's not
Speaker 1: as though in another few decades scientists are going to
Speaker 1: announce that we've got it all worked out. Why not
Speaker 1: because humans are complex and mental life varies along many axes.
Speaker 1: Some people suffer deep mental illnesses, and most thinkers believe
Speaker 1: that they should be treated differently. But how do we
Speaker 1: draw a bright line in the sand of a very
Speaker 1: complex landscape. The legal system, after all, is forced to
Speaker 1: be categorical. The judge and jury are tasked with deciding
Speaker 1: whether a defendant is or is not insane. And the
Speaker 1: fact is that science and the law are strange bedfellows
Speaker 1: because science does not see things in binary categories like that.
Speaker 1: So the legal system has been wrestling for many decades
Speaker 1: about how a person's cognition and volition matter in their culpability.
Speaker 1: But every time a famous person gets attacked, society's generous
Speaker 1: interest in this issue gets scaled back. Why because many people,
Speaker 1: perhaps most have little to know experience with mental illness,
Speaker 1: and therefore they see the insanity plea as simply an
Speaker 1: excuse that people people are trying for bad behavior. After all,
Speaker 1: how would you know with certainty whether lorraina Bobbits act
Speaker 1: was an irresistible impulse or justin urge that had not
Speaker 1: been repelled. So with the intersection of neuroscience and law,
Speaker 1: there is not always a clear solution. But we know
Speaker 1: enough about human variation to know that the search has
Speaker 1: to continue, and so, as it stands, different jurisdictions make
Speaker 1: individualized choices about how they think insanity should be handled.
Speaker 1: So what happened to Andrea Yates, the woman who drowned
Speaker 1: her children in the bathtub. Her council pled the insanity defense.
Speaker 1: They argued that she had suffered from severe mental illness,
Speaker 1: that she'd attempted suicide many times, that she'd shuttled in
Speaker 1: and out of psychiatric hospitals, and that she had this
Speaker 1: belief that she was saving her children from hell by
Speaker 1: killing them. Her plea was unsuccessful. On the one year
Speaker 1: anniversary of her father's death, Andrea Yates was found guilty
Speaker 1: of murder, but Andrea's defense counsel found reason to hope
Speaker 1: for a mistrial. Remember, the prosecutor mentioned an episode of
Speaker 1: Law and Order in which a woman drowned her children
Speaker 1: in the bathtub. As it turned out, there was no
Speaker 1: episode with that plot. Whether this was by deception or
Speaker 1: just misremembering, Dietz's claim had been totally false. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and five, Andrea's conviction was reversed because of Dietz's
Speaker 1: false testimony. A four week retrial ensued, and this time
Speaker 1: the jury found Andrea not guilty by reason of insanity.
Speaker 1: Andrea is locked away for life, but in a psychiatric
Speaker 1: institution where she has a roommate, she gets care, she's
Speaker 1: on medications, the public is safe, she presents no danger
Speaker 1: to anybody, and she can obtain the help that she needs.
Speaker 1: So why is there a public resistance to the insanity defense. Well, first,
Speaker 1: there's often this misunderstanding about the not guilty part of
Speaker 1: the plea, and the public is often horrified by the
Speaker 1: notion that some person, whether that's McNaughton or Hinckley, is
Speaker 1: not culpable for a horrific crime. There's a feeling that
Speaker 1: they're not appropriately punished for their actions if they're simply
Speaker 1: sent to a cushy hospital. And also a lot of people,
Speaker 1: especially those with no direct connection to someone with mental illness,
Speaker 1: they think that everyone is the same on the inside,
Speaker 1: and that the insanity defense is just an invitation to deceive. Now,
Speaker 1: one thing to note here is that only one percent
Speaker 1: of felony cases in the US involve the insanity defense.
Speaker 1: It's not generally a part of public knowledge that this
Speaker 1: is such a very rare plea. Instead, a lot of
Speaker 1: people have the opinion that everyone who murderers is simply
Speaker 1: going to plead insanity to try to get away with that,
Speaker 1: and of those who plead the insanity defense, only about
Speaker 1: thirty cases or successful each year. Even in these successful cases,
Speaker 1: the sentences are often longer because a person can be
Speaker 1: sentenced to a prison hospital for a long time, and
Speaker 1: it's not uncommon that those sentences end up being worse
Speaker 1: than prison itself. What worse means depends on the decade
Speaker 1: you're in, but sometimes In these prison hospitals, a person
Speaker 1: is kept in a drug induced stupor for the remaining
Speaker 1: years of their life. So, in the same way that
Speaker 1: prisons can often lead to more crime, some mental health
Speaker 1: institutions are thought to actually worsen a psychosis. For this reason,
Speaker 1: there was a push for the institutionalization in nineteen sixties America.
Speaker 1: The country used to run a large mental health care
Speaker 1: system of what were called insane asylums, but these asylums
Speaker 1: proved less than perfect. In many instances, men and women
Speaker 1: in hospital gowns led meaningless lives. They were just bodies
Speaker 1: being kept alive. So these mental institutions were shut down
Speaker 1: with plans to have a network of halfway houses and
Speaker 1: other mechanisms to help people back into productive society, but
Speaker 1: that part was never fully implemented, and so the shutdown
Speaker 1: led to a large homeless population and to many of
Speaker 1: the former inhabitants of the asylums flowing into the prison system.
Speaker 1: So some people argue that the insanity defense is not
Speaker 1: often invoked, in part because prison hospitalizations can be worse
Speaker 1: and lasts longer than prison sentences. And there's another problem
Speaker 1: that some scholars point to about the not guilty by
Speaker 1: reason of insanity plea, which is that jurors find themselves
Speaker 1: in a tough spot when they have to deal with
Speaker 1: the words not guilty. After all, the person did commit
Speaker 1: the crime, right. It turns out that when juries are
Speaker 1: given other options, they come to more nuanced decisions. So
Speaker 1: to this end, some states have adopted the term guilty
Speaker 1: but mentally ill, and that gives an option to root
Speaker 1: someone to mental health care while not making the jury
Speaker 1: feel as though they're letting someone off scot free. So,
Speaker 1: in this way, when a defendant with a psychosis shoots
Speaker 1: somebody in the back, we can come to the slightly
Speaker 1: more satisfying conclusion that he is guilty of the crime.
Speaker 1: But there's another issue that requires consideration of the best
Speaker 1: root forward. So how we phrase things matters. So where
Speaker 1: is Andrea Yates today? Well, she still resides at the
Speaker 1: Kerville State Hospital in Texas. Her husband, Rusty, went to
Speaker 1: law school with the aim of improving the societal response
Speaker 1: to the criminal behavior of mentally ill defendants and improving
Speaker 1: the healthcare system for the mentally ill. Part of Andrea's
Speaker 1: time in Kerville is devoted to craftmaking, the fruits of
Speaker 1: which she sells anonymously at craft shows. Andrea donates the
Speaker 1: majority of her earnings from the sales to the Yates
Speaker 1: Children Memorial Fund. So to wrap up, we've been seeing
Speaker 1: throughout these episodes how different people's internal models can be,
Speaker 1: and therefore how different their realities can be. We've talked
Speaker 1: elsewhere about synesthesia or a fantasia, or different levels of empathy,
Speaker 1: or a hundred other ways that people can see the
Speaker 1: world differently on some sort of spectrum. And for Andrea,
Speaker 1: her internal model told her I believe quite genuinely that
Speaker 1: her children were going to hell, and so she did
Speaker 1: what she believed was the right thing given her reality.
Speaker 1: And all of this emphasizes the complexity of putting together
Speaker 1: billions of brains to work and live together in a
Speaker 1: massive collaboration that we call society. Go to Eagleman dot
Speaker 1: com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Speaker 1: Send me an email at podcasts at Eagleman dot com
Speaker 1: with questions or discussions, and then making episodes in which
Speaker 1: I address those until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and
Speaker 1: this is Inner Cosmos.