Word: caplan
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...insanity defense should not be viewed as a technical sieve that lets nervous assassins pass by judicial strictures with impunity. Not only is the defense used infrequently; when it is used, it is even less successful. Caplan's evidence is telling. After the 1983 passage of the Insanity Defense Reform Act in New York, "less than one half of one percent [of those arrested] avoided the criminal justice system for mental health reasons ... less than 2 percent of this tiny portion successfully plead insanity." None of those who assassinated, or attempted to assassinate, Robert F. Kennedy '48, the Rev. Martin...
...complaint that the defense is the handmaiden to moneyed justice, Caplan cites the 1972 Brawner decision. The opinion established the standard which holds that a person is not responsible for a crime if, as a result of mental disease, he or she lacks the capacity to "appreciate" the wrongfulness of his or her conduct. But the case also made light of a "well guarded secret." According to the opinion, the majority of responsibility cases concern indigents, not affluent defendants with easy access to legal and psychiatric assistance...
...CAPLAN, reading the fine print and the fictitious rhetoric, cries foul. He is quick to recognize that the attempt, however fashionable, to undercut a defendant's individual rights in the name of "security" or societal rights is at best self-defeating and at worst dangerous...
...American public, the Hinckley acquittal became the symbol of excessive, and indulged, violence. To Caplan it is neither a judicial coup or rallying point, just a necessary working of an inviolate standard. Administration fingers, tinkering with the defense, will only reveal an injudicious strong...
DEMANDS for reform after the trial were loud, political and, according to Caplan, inconclusive. The hope was somehow to reconcile that natural gut reaction which sees the act, the victim, the murderer and calls a spade a spade with the more informed need to preserve conceptions of human will, avoid the connection between illness and evil, and abstain from seeking the hypocritical solution of committing the sick to prisons that offer no treatment or hospitals that are no better than prisons. Discussion centered on two legal reforms: allowing for a verdict of guilty but insane; and restricting the scope...