The Effects of the Guilty but Mentally Ill verdict on the outcome of a jury trial

1
The Effects of the Guilty but Mentally Ill
verdict on the outcome of a jury trial

• Michael Eagan

2
Overview

• What is the Insanity Defense
• Discuss the history and evolution of the insanity
  defense
• The Guilty But Mentally Ill verdict
• Current state of the Insanity Defense
• Does the Guilty but Mentally Ill verdict effect
  the outcome of a trial

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The Insanity Defense

• Claim that a mental disorder caused the accused
  to commit the crime
• Affirmative defense
• If proven true
• It will defeat prosecutions allegations even if
  claim is true
• Does this by Negating the Elements of a crime
• Today federal law places the additional burden
  of proving insanity by clear and convincing
  evidence (18 U.S.C. 17)

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History of the Insanity Defense

• Pre-McNaughton
• Roman Law
• Non-Compos Mentis
• Latin for without mastery of mind
• Mens rea
• Three Phases
• Good and Evil test
• Wild beast test
• Right and wrong test

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Good and Evil Test

• First appeared in England cases around 1313
• Origins
• Biblical and Religious concepts
• Insane thought of as children
• Incapable of sinning because they could not
  distinguish good from the evil
• Not guilty
• Defendant would not have known the difference
  between good and evil at the time of the crime
• In use 14th16th centuries
• Replace by the wild beast test in 1724

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Wild Beast Test

• English case
• 1724
• Rex v. Arnold
• Defendant accused of shooting and trying to kill
  a British lord
• The trial judge acquitted the defendant finding
  him
• a man totally deprived of his understanding and
  memory, and doth not know what he is doing, no
  more than a brute, or a wild beast, such a one is
  never the object of punishment.

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Wild Beast Test

• Wild Beast test misnomer
• Not wild beast that comes to mind today
• Judges comments where read out of context and
  mistranslated from Latin
• Brutis Brute
• Wild beast farm animals like foxes, deer,
  and rabbits (1724, England)
• the intellectual ability of a farm animal
• Changed the insanity defense
• from moral failing (i.e. good versus evil) to a
  cognitive failing

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Right and Wrong Test

• England 1840
• Regina v. Oxford
• precursor to the McNaughton rule
• Lord Denman instructed the jury to acquit the
  defendant by reason of insanity if he was found
  to suffer
• from the effect of a disease mind
• if he was quite unaware of the nature,
  character, and consequences of the act he was
  committing (right from wrong)

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McNaughton (MNaghten) Rule

• English case, 1843
• Daniel McNaughton was a woodcutter from Scotland
• Thought government was trying to kill him
• Prime Minister Robert Peel was persecuting him
• Unsuccessful
• Peel was riding with Queen Victoria in her
  carriage
• Killed Prime Ministers Secretary, Edward
  Drummond

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McNaughton Rule

• Early English Common law views emphasized
• defendants ability to know the difference
  between moral good and evil or,
• defendants knowledge of the nature of their act
  (i.e. right from wrong)
• McNaughton Rule tried to combine both of these
  views
• nine medical experts testified McNaughton was
  insane
• jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity
  (NGRI).
• Spent rest of live in Broadmoor insane asylum

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McNaughton Rule

• McNaughton verdict incensed Queen Victoria and
  caused public outcry
• Queen Victoria commanded the House of Lords to
  pass new laws to protect the public from the
  wrath of madmen who could now kill with
  impunity.
• Their high court came up with the McNaughton
  Rule, which has three parts.

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McNaughton Rule

1. The presumption that the defendant is sane and
   responsible for their criminal acts
2. defendant must have been suffering under a
   defect of reason or from disease of the mind.
   to be found not guilty
3. defendant must not know the nature and quality
   of the act he was doing, or if he did know it,
   that he did not know what he was doing was
   wrong.

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McNaughton Rule

• Criticisms
• More then one way to form an acceptable defense
• Show lack of mens rea
• wrongfulness aspect of this rule
• Most insanity statues mention some form of
  wrongfulness test
• Solutions
• simply asking if the defendant knew that the
  action was wrong or by telling the jury that the
  defendant must have had the capacity to
  understand the nature of the act.
• Other jurisdictions have just left it up to the
  jury to decide what the terms of the McNaughton
  Rule mean

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Irresistible Impulse Test

• Professionals criticize the wrongfulness
  component of the McNaughton Rule saying that
  cognition is only one part
• The McNaughton rule makes no provision for the
  degrees of insanity.
• Under the McNaughton rule the person either knows
  what they are doing, and/or knows that the act is
  wrong to be found sane.
• In the 1920s many states attempted to solve
  these problems by modifying their McNaughton
  rules to allow for irresistible impulse
  defenses.
• Because At the time, it was widely believed that
  some forms of behavior where beyond the
  controlled of certain individuals

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Irresistible Impulse test

• To be found not guilty by reason of insanity
• his reasoning powers were so far dethroned by
  his diseased mental condition as to deprive him
  of willpower to resist the insane impulse to
  perpetrate the deed, though knowing it to be
  wrong Smith v. United States, 1929

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Irresistible Impulse Test

• policeman at the elbow test.
• The jurors are told that if the accused would
  not have committed that act had there been a
  policeman present, he cannot be said to have
  acted under irresistible impulse

17
Irresistible Impulse Test

• Test did not last long
• Too hard to tell when an impulse was irresistible
  and when it was not due too the subjectivity of
  each individual juror.
• impossible to know if a person cannot control
  their behavior in specific situations and that
  the uncontrollable impulse test can be used as an
  excuse by anybody who has committed a crime.

18
Durham Rule(Product Rule)

• Court decided that the legal tests for insanity
  where either obsolete or flawed.
• An accused is not criminally responsible if his
  unlawful act was the product of mental disease or
  mental defect.
• Problems
• Out of touch with medical reality
• Doctors had a hard time describing insanity as
  the court did
• Most lawyers and judges felt this test gave to
  much power to medical professionals

19
United States v. Brawner

• In 1972 the court which created the Durham Rule
  rejected it
• prevailing community standards approach
• defined insanity in terms of social justice,
  instead of the more commonly used legal and
  psychiatric definitions.
• Because of this, it was not adopted not well
  received and quickly fell out of favor.
• Brawner decision helped lead to the adoption of
  the ALI test

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ALI TestSubstantial Capacity Test

• In 1955
• Response to the dissatisfaction with all of
  these insanity standards
• The American Law Institute (ALI) created the
  substantial capacity test and incorporated it
  into the Model Penal Code
• A person is not responsible for criminal conduct
  if at the time of such conduct as a result of
  mental disease or defect he lacks substantial
  capacity either to appreciate the criminality
  wrongfulness of his conduct or to conform his
  conduct to the requirements of the law

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ALI Test

• Test tries to combine McNaughton Rule with the
  irresistible impulse test
• First Prong
• McNaughton cognitive component
• Second Prong
• irresistible impulse test
• Very well received
• Used by 26 states and the federal government

22
Guilty But Mentally Ill

• Hinckley Case was main force behind Guilty but
  Mentally ill statues
• dropped out of Texas Tech University in 1976
• Moved to Hollywood to make it big in the music
  industry
• While in California, he became infatuated with
  the movie Taxi Driver and its star Jodie Foster

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Guilty But Mentally Ill

• Hinckley was delusional and tried to recreate a
  scene from the Taxi Driver to win Jodie Fosters
  love
• To do this he decided to attempt to assassinate
  President Ronald Reagan
• Jurors used the ALI test of Model Penal Code
  which was in use by the federal government at
  that tine

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GBMI

• Jurors where told to return a not guilty unless
  they could agree beyond a reasonable doubt that
  Hinckley was sane
• Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of
  insanity
• Is now serving a life sentence in a mental
  health institution

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GBMI

• Public was Outrage
• Over ½ of the states returned to McNaughton like
  standards
• Before this most states followed the ALI test of
  the model Penal code
• Some states even abolished the insanity defense
  altogether
• In 1984 congress passed the Crime Control and
  Prevention Act which included the Insanity
  Defense Reform Act (IDRA) of 1984.

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GBMI

• Crime Control and Prevention Act
• Affirmative defense
• Shifted burden of proof onto defendant by proving
  their case by clear and convincing evidence
• IDRA, instituted a civil commitment process
• If defendant is found not guilty by reason of
  insanity they are held in custody until a court
  hearing on their state of mind can be held
  (usually with in forty days of the verdict)

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GBMI

• second outcome of the Hinckley verdict was the
  creation of the Guilty but Mentally Ill (GBMI)
  verdict
• Guilty but mentally ill gives four possible
  verdicts
• Guilty
• Not guilty
• Not guilty by reason of insanity
• Guilty but Mentally Ill

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GBMI

• Guilty but mentally ill
• corpus delicti of the crime has been meet beyond
  a reasonable doubt.
• The defendant was mentally ill at the time the
  crime occurred.
• the defendant is not found to be legally insane
  at the time the crime was committed.

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GBMI

• The verdict of guilty but mentally ill is reached
  if the defendant satisfies the ALIs standards of
  substantial capacity and wrongfulness.
• For the defendant to be found legally insane
  only the McNaughton standard of knowing right
  from wrong is used.
• The McNaughton rule is harder to satisfy then the
  ALI test for mental illness it is more likely
  that a defendant would be found guilty but
  mentally ill instead of mentally insane

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GBMI

• The finding of GBMI is equivalent to that of
  guilty verdict
• The defendant is sentenced the same as other
  people
• After sentencing
• Evaluated to see if they require psychiatric
  treatment and/or hospitalization
• If the defendant is later cured sent to a
  regular prison facility
• time spent in the hospital and correctional
  facility count towards their sentence completion
  
• When the offender sentence is served the
  offender will then be released even if they still
  suffer from a mental illness

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Effects of the GBMI verdict

• The GBMI verdict original intent was to reduce
  the number of acquittals by reason of insanity
• verdict was also felt to guarantee the treatment
  of the offenders who needed it.

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Analysis

• Most of the research has suggested that it cannot
  be determined with any reasonable amount of
  certainty that the GBMI verdict has an impact on
  the outcome of a trial
• However, common sense and anecdotal evidence
  suggests that the Guilty but Mentally Ill verdict
  (GBMI) has some impact on the verdict albeit a
  very small one.

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Analysis

• Almost all the research agrees that goal of
  treating the offender has rarely been meet.
• The GBMI verdict has succeeded in reducing the
  numbers of acquittals due to insanity pleas.
• But when this occurred it was usually to the
  determent of the defendant
• This is because when the GBMI verdict changed the
  outcome of the trial it usually does so in the
  favor of the guilty plea.

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State and federal laws

• Currently 26 states and the federal government
  use the McNaughton Rule
• 20 states and D.C. uses the ALI test
• Three states did not specify what they use
• Montana does not use the insanity defense
• Only three states use the GBMI verdict
• Texas uses the McNaughton rule and the
  irresistible impulse test they do not employ the
  GBMI verdict