The Mad, the Bad, and the Innocent The Criminal Mind on Trial - Tales of a Forensic Psychologist

The New York area's premier forensic psychologist--the expert prosecutors turn to when a defendant claims insanity--looks back over her most celebrated cases to deliver a no-holds-barred critique of recent insanity defense abuses. Zeroing in on cases such as the Menendez brothers and Jeffrey Dahmer, Kirwin shows how unscrupulous defense attorneys and overzealous prosecutors have perverted the true purpose of the insanity defense. of photos.

CHAPTER ONE

THE MAD AND THE BAD:

INSIDE THE CRIMINAL PSYCHE

She wore a red sari with intricate gold filigree. He wore a jewel-encrusted turban and a black silk suit. An orange sash, symbolic of the bond between man and wife in Hindu marriage rites, yoked the coffins in which the two twenty-year-olds lay. After the cremation, their ashes would be taken to India and scattered on the Ganges.

Shaleen Wadwhani was starting medical school on a full scholarship; Hema Sakhrani was aiming for a degree in chemistry. The parents of the engaged couple, immigrants from India and Pakistan, listened over the clouds of incense and glowing candles as a Brahman priest intoned the funeral verses. They sprinkled the bodies with sandalwood oil, colored powders, and clarified butter.

Noticeably absent from the funeral was the Nathan family. Mohes Nathan had been Hema's godmother. Her oldest son, Chandran, had always been something of an uncle to Hema. He used to baby-sit for her and more recently had helped her with her homework and studies.

Now Chandran Nathan sat in a jail cell in Mineola, New York, fifteen miles away, charged with second-degree murder in the killing of Hema's betrothed, Shaleen Wadwhani. When Hema was told of her fiance's death, she leaped from the window of her family's sixteenth-floor apartment. Her last words were, "Why did this happen?"

Why did it happen? When I first heard about the killing on the eleven o'clock news, I had a premonition I would be called upon as a forensic psychologist to answer that question. According to the news report, Nathan, a thirty-five-year-old Sri Lankan immigrant and actuary for the City of New York, obsessed with a young woman, had gone berserk, confronted her fiance at his home on suburban Long Island, and emptied forty-one rounds from an assault rifle through the heavy oak door, riddling the body of the young medical student who stood behind it. I watched the television footage of Nathan being taken away in handcuffs by police; I saw how the media were already in the process of turning this swarthy man with his heavy-lidded, glowering eyes into a parody of the evil foreign terrorist.

Nearly a year would pass before my premonition proved true and it became my task to try to get inside the mind of this enigmatic, fearsome man and to reconstruct what might have been going on for him at the moment he opened fire with an MAK-90, on Monday, May 24, 1993.

For more than two decades, I have attempted to straddle two disparate, often conflicting wings of the ever-evolving science of psychology. I've maintained a private psychotherapy practice named Harborview, for its scenic location on Long Island's north shore. My patients are usually high achievers, often pillars of the community, but inside they wrestle with the pain of depression, anxiety, or memories of childhood incest and abuse. Quietly, even heroically, these ordinary folk come week after week to face their problems. When I leave the safety of my therapy office for the courts and the jails, I am grappling with the minds and motives of people who may have the same sources of emotional pain but who have acted it out tragically, often violently.

The profession of forensic psychology, a recent fusion of psychology and the law, is practiced by a minority of licensed psychologists in the United States and taught in a handful of graduate programs. I am usually called upon by prosecutors in all five boroughs of New York City and in its suburbs to venture into the tortured folds of the minds behind crime--minds like Chandran Nathan's. I use the traditional tools of my trade--trained observation, clinical interviews, detailed history-taking, and psychological tests--combined with the street smarts I've gained as a narcotics parole officer and by interviewing hundreds of murderers. But sometimes I must rely on psychological guerrilla tactics, like agreeing with a psychotic's delusions, entering his hallucinations, or stoking a defendant's enthusiasm about drugs, sex, or guns. In these ways, I cull the killers who have no inkling of the wrongfulness of their crime from those who know exactly what they have done. In other words, I try to separate the mad from the bad.

As a woman, a wife, and a mother, I feel like I go through a sort of decompression chamber when I shift from holding a young rape victim's hand during a therapy session in my office to spending hours in a urine-reeking lockup, exploring with a killer the reasons why he gunned down his romantic rival on his doorstep. Sometimes I feel as if I almost have to change in a phone booth.

Certainly I felt that way in the case of Chandran Nathan. Nathan's attorneys were planning to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but the psychiatrist retained by the defense, an exceptionally scrupulous professional named Stu Kleinman, couldn't quite put his finger on a diagnosis for Nathan. He asked me to consult as a "fake-buster" to ascertain whether Nathan was truly mentally ill or a psychopath who might just be malingering--trying to pretend he was psychotic to get acquitted under the insanity defense and not face criminal responsibility for his act. I am usually called in as a last resort, when the stakes are high and the mind of the killer on trial eludes other experts.

I pride myself on being painstakingly thorough. I always arrange to spend a minimum of ten hours face to face with the accused, giving him or her tests while I closely scrutinize behavior, body language, emotional reactions, style of relating, and thought patterns. This is called the clinical observation stage of an examination. Next, I take a careful and detailed history. Not only am I searching for any symptoms of mental illness in the past, I am also gleaning other sources of information perhaps overlooked by the police, any of which might shed light on the defendant's mental state at the time of the crime. I always administer at least four hours of standardized psychological tests aimed at pinpointing a defendant's psychiatric diagnosis, analyzing personality structure, and revealing covert attitudes, thoughts, and beliefs, all of which might have a bearing on his or her attempt to fake mental illness and elude criminal responsibility. My specialty is subjecting the data I obtain to successive mathematical corrective formulas to filter the truly psychotic from those who are malingering.

Whenever I can, I interview family and friends extensively both to corroborate the history given me by the defendant and to gain insight into his behavior and personality. Sadly, I often undertake interviews with families of the victims, especially when they are well known by the defendant. The "shopping list" of information I seek from the district attorney always includes Motor Vehicle Division records, rap sheets, medical and psychological records, employment history, and school records as far back as kindergarten. I leave nothing to speculation.

After I have reviewed all of this information about the defendant, I go about tailoring the crux of my examination--the session during which I lead the defendant step by step through the days leading up to the crime, the killing itself (virtually all the defendants I evaluate have been charged with murder), and the events immediately following that culminated in his arrest. This is the point in my forensic examination where my opinion crystallizes about the defendant's ultimate criminal responsibility and his ability to tell right from wrong.

My forensic workup is a good deal more intensive than that of most other forensic psychologists, but anything less would not satisfy my standard for formulating an opinion "with a reasonable degree of psychological certainty," which is what New York's insanity defense statute calls for. What goes on in the mind of a murderer at the moment of his crime will always remain unknowable. But I believe it is my professional mandate to make the most thorough, informed, and educated judgment I can.

Although they are all experts in a court of law, mental health forensic experts perform a role different from that of nonpsychiatric medical doctors, fingerprint or DNA specialists, and ballistics experts. Experts in other fields merely testify with a "reasonable degree of scientific certainty" that a defendant could or could not have committed the crime. The psychological expert in insanity defense trials, however, already knows that the defendant has committed the crime. When I am examining a defendant, I know very well that the hands that are marking "true" and "false" on my test grids have taken the life of one or many human beings.

The psychological expert has the unenviable job of assessing not the probability that the defendant committed the crime but his state of mind at the split second the criminal act was performed. Rather than employing scientifically precise and quantifiable methods like those enjoyed by DNA scientists, ballistics experts, or medical examiners, the behavioral scientist possesses rudimentary, inferential tools that can only even up the odds over hunches.

Despite popular conceptions, the psychological expert is not asked to describe for the court why someone committed a certain crime. Our job, and one we are well equipped to confront, is simply to ascertain the presence or absence of incapacitating mental illness at the time of the crime. State-of-the-art standardized tests can provide us with answers and approach reliabilities and validities of close to 90 percent accuracy. If in our psychological opinion a defendant has a psychosis, we can declare that belief, providing some description of the way in which the defendant's illness affects his ability to function and to form the requisite intent for his crimes. Those tasks should be the total limit of a forensic psychologist's expertise in an insanity defense trial.

Unfortunately, lawyers like to corner the expert into answering the ultimate question of insanity. Judges also don't mind hanging their decisions on the already burdened shoulders of the expert. The media tend to personalize and simplify the battle of the experts in insanity defense trials. Yet even in my most expansive moments, I never assume that a verdict in an insanity defense trial rests entirely on my testimony.

I knew from the first that Chandran Nathan was a "messy" defendant for an insanity defense--not psychotic looking enough, not raving, talking to himself, or gesturing wildly, and not sympathetic, pathetic, or likable. Moreover, he was a cultural alien, not someone with whom a jury could easily identify. The Nassau County district attorney would have a field day pointing out what seemed to be Nathan's premeditated violence, his motives for revenge, and his attempts to elude capture and possibly even flee to the Philippines. It seemed like an open-and-shut case of homicide. But in my twenty-two years of grappling with the human psyche behind jailhouse bars and behind the closed doors of the therapy room, I have learned that in the extremes of murderous behavior things are seldom what they seem.

I first met with Nathan on April 11, 1994, in the Nassau County jail. He was a well-groomed and pleasantly round-faced man with smooth skin and blue-black hair. His small stature and compact build gave him a disarmingly boyish appearance for his age. "I've been looking forward to meeting you," he said courteously, with a hint of a British accent. "Joel Rifkin has told me all about you."

Some reference! I thought to myself. Joel Rifkin, whose exam I had just finished, was a serial killer who had murdered seventeen prostitutes. His trial would become such a media circus that any question of his sanity would be lost in the frenzy to convict him.

At first, Nathan was shy, cautious, and guarded around me. I took out a roll of Lifesavers and offered him one. He refused politely and said, "At this point I need more than a candy lifesaver."

I smiled back at him, unsure if Nathan knew the full implications of his pun.

As we talked, I discovered he had a large fund of information about computers, electronics, and all sorts of machines. He was curious about the type of car I drove and was impressed with my choice of a five-speed Mazda RX-7 with its rotary engine. He would later mail me an incredibly detailed letter instructing me how to tune up a turbocharged Wankel engine. I felt like he was sending me a love letter.

He worked intently on the paper-and-pencil tests I gave him but frequently asked peculiar, almost inappropriate questions or made strange statements. At one point I looked up from checking his answers in the test booklet to catch him staring admiringly at me. "It was my destiny to have a female doctor who has had a great deal of success," he told me. "I knew this because the last three letters of your name are win. This means I have a winner--you're good!" Nathan was utterly serious.

Such was his magical, childish world. Random events in the news, rock 'n' roll songs heard over the radio, coincidence, dreams, and private fantasies--everything, no matter how trivial or unrelated, bore a special message pertaining directly to him, or so he thought. This symptom is called "ideas of reference." Chandran Nathan, who bragged to me that his family called him Raja, was indeed the center of his own universe, where every occurrence had portentous meaning for him.

Nathan liked to compare himself to Mr. Spock from Star Trek. "I am very controlled, unemotional, logical, and intelligent," he informed me. "Nonhuman." Obsessed with the image of himself as a superhero, he declared, "I assume a dual identity as a crime fighter, like Batman, standing on a rooftop and surveying my domain, thinking to myself how I helped make this world a better and safer place to live in." Whenever I got him off the subject of electronics and machines, which was his expertise, his thinking was always strange, disjointed, and fantastic. Emotionally incapable of realizing the horror of his crime, Nathan struck me as a grotesque but pitiable Peter Pan, lost in his personal never-never land of postpubescent sexual fantasies and sci-fi superheroes. Chandran Nathan was like a child playing murderous games in a man's world.

When I went over Nathan's test results, what emerged was the most classic form of paranoia I had ever seen. Chandran Nathan manifested a distinct absence of emotion, an inability to connect with people, suspiciousness, and illogical, loose, and delusional thinking. He was a nitpicker, a collector of trivial details, but was incapable of seeing a larger perspective. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the bible of the American Psychiatric Association, calls this symptom of paranoia "loss of appreciation of context."

Nearly a month after our first meeting, I visited Nathan again. I'd been unhappy with the lapse of time since our last visit--an occupational frustration for me, since I am always juggling several forensic cases at once. Moreover, interviewing a defendant requires something of an incubation process, in which the accrual of information and detail is central to my forensic determination. Nathan was delighted to see me, having followed Joel Rifkin's trial in the news and chatted about it with Rifkin, his cell neighbor, on several occasions. After all, we have made serial killers into cultural antiheroes of sorts, and as the sole witness for Rifkin's defense, I had a starring role in that drama. As a result, I was being incorporated into Nathan's fantasy life; I was his cartoon avenger, his Wonder Woman.

Beaming, he produced a white linen handkerchief. "I made this for you," he said. Gingerly unfolding it, he revealed an elaborate drawing, which he presented to me like a posy of flowers.

I recoiled. The nude female figure he had drawn was the type you would see in a Penthouse cartoon. It was penciled in garish red, with huge projecting breasts, black stiletto boots, long gloves, and spiked leather choker. The satanic pointed ears, horns, and tail bespoke the glaring label printed beside it: EVIL. The face, I realized, resembled mine.

Was Nathan so socially obtuse and detached that he could not anticipate how a female doctor who was retained to evaluate him psychologically might react to this? That single, bizarre, and unnerving gesture defined how Nathan operated, especially with women.

"What does this mean?" I asked, as evenly as I could.

"I'm good at drawing," was all Nathan said to me.

Regaining my composure, I focused on the principal purpose of this visit, which was to take Nathan's psychological history and to continue piecing together the puzzle of this man. Chandran Nathan, born in Sri Lanka, moved to America at age ten. He grew up in an Archie Bunker neighborhood of Queens with a father who was a physics professor and a mother who was a math teacher. Nathan, who claimed that almost into his teens he still believed that "babies came out of the belly button," was especially unprepared to deal with the pervasive sexuality of Western culture. He found his early sexual outlets in the form of exhibitionism. At age fourteen, he would hide in the stairwells of nearby apartment buildings and expose himself to women as they got off the elevator. I knew how those women felt. When he handed me that lewd handkerchief, I suspected, he was doing to me what he had done to them. The thrill for Nathan lay in the ambush, the element of surprise.

Nathan was embarrassed that I should even think of him as ever having been a sweaty-palmed adolescent. As a psychologist, I did not dismiss Chandran Nathan's early sexual exhibitionism as lightly as the juvenile courts and his family ultimately had; they had believed that the situation would correct itself as he became an adult. To me, his exhibitionism meant he was suffering from one of that class of sexual disorders called paraphilias--like fetishism, pedophilia, and bestiality--which signal real disturbance in a person's ability to have intimate relationships. These sexual hang-ups tend to become chronic and lifelong, the fantasies often growing more elaborate over time.

Pressured by his family, who like members of so many immigrant groups before them viewed higher education and a profession as the ticket to success and acceptance in America, Chandran Nathan excelled in the classroom and entered college at age sixteen. He lived at home, supported by his parents, until he completed his master's degree in computer science. Nathan was hired as an engineer by the Harris Corporation but was dismissed for incompetence before the six-month probation period ended. After a lengthy search, he landed a job with the City of New York Human Resources Administration. Again, he was fired for poor performance after a few months. Nathan believed he had lost his job because his Chinese supervisor had it in for him as an Indian.

Nathan began systematically harassing his former boss. He threw garbage, old tires, auto parts, and finally a string of firecrackers on his front lawn. Painstakingly, Nathan put together a video--a pastiche of clippings from porno movies, Batman, and sci-fi thrillers--which he left on his former supervisor's car hood.

He giggled as he recounted to me the elaborate preparations he had gone through, each detail seemingly a credit to his cleverness. He hot-wired his supervisor's car and drove it around the block and parked it--just so he could scare the man into believing that his car had been stolen. Finally he threw a rock with a menacing note through the plate glass storm door.

"What if one of your supervisor's children had been standing behind the glass door and had gotten hit by the rock?" I asked him. Nathan looked at me and blinked, wide-eyed. "Why would they be standing behind the door?"

Chandran Nathan had been arrested and charged with aggravated harassment and criminal trespass, both misdemeanors. He had told the police about his weapon collection; yet, in a tragic misdiagnosis, the court-appointed psychiatrist at the time concluded that there was no psychiatric basis for preventing Nathan from getting his gun collection back.

After this legal problem, he settled into a job as an actuary with the City of New York. Now over thirty years old, he had never dated or even associated with women. Following the dictates of his Indian culture, he agreed to an arranged marriage with a young woman of East Indian heritage who lived in the Philippines. (With a bitter civil war raging in Sri Lanka, his options for a bride from his own land were limited.) Nathan told me he was unable to make love to the woman he eventually married. He didn't even know her.

Over four years, as his life became more complicated--with a wife, a home, financial burdens, demands for sex he could not meet--Nathan withdrew more to the sanctuary he had created in his basement. After a while, he did not even come up for meals or to sleep with his wife. He surrounded himself with automotive and woodworking projects, superhero and porno videos, and his ever-growing collection of guns.

It took two months of a very hot summer before I could arrange another visit with Nathan. It had been reported to me that he was becoming increasingly agitated, and his mother was even more concerned about his welfare. I met in my office with Chandran Nathan's parents the week before my next interview with him, to verify the details of his life and psychological history. Nathan's father was convinced that Hema Sakhrani had been thrilled about her upcoming marriage and that her relationship with Nathan was innocent: "After all, Chandran already had a wife," he told me conclusively--as if in Western society that was enough to put an end to any sexual possibilities between his son and Hema. However, Mrs. Nathan, who rarely spoke up without a nod of permission from her husband, confided to me in private that Hema had expressed uneasiness about her approaching marriage.

His case had preoccupied me. I needed to know more about Nathan and his crime, and every day moved us further away from his state of mind the night he killed Shaleen Wadwhani. Now, at last, on my third intensive day of interviewing him, I would have more than five hours just to go over his feelings and thoughts about Hema and what happened the night of the fatal shooting. Nathan was relaxed; he seemed comfortable with me and lost no time launching into his story.

He started by claiming that he and Hema had been "affectionate" with each other. "Might you have misinterpreted Hema's flirtatiousness?" I asked carefully.

"No!" Nathan pounded his fist on the jailhouse table. "I would have known if she really wanted to marry Wadwhani."

Was his bond with Hema a figment of Nathan's imagination, or was it possible that the young girl flirted with her older "uncle," who lavished her with attention and gifts? Was Hema, like Nathan, caught in the clash of two cultures, longing to be free? Did Hema leap to her death in grief or because, as Nathan suggested to me, "she would have to make a full confession that there was another man in her life"? Did Hema commit suicide to spare her family and herself shame and disgrace? Nathan pointed out with perverse righteousness that in their Indian culture, such a confession would have left Hema all but an outcast and unmarriageable.

He had to rescue Hema from an unsuitable marriage, Nathan told me. So preoccupied was he with this dilemma that he could not keep his mind on the woodworking project he was attempting in his basement workshop. He was carelessly spraying paint in the poorly ventilated room when the spray can slipped out of his hand and hit the floor, jamming the nozzle open. Nathan tossed the wildly spraying can into a bucket of water near the pilot light of the gas hot water heater. His clothes went up in a flash. He managed to put the fire out but suffered second-degree burns to his legs and hands. At the emergency room he was prescribed Tylenol with codeine for pain.

The following day, suffering from the painful burns and disoriented from lack of sleep and codeine, Nathan created a plan. Shaleen was hiding something. Nathan, the secret agent, would confront Shaleen, expose the truth, and save the heroine.

As I listened, Nathan's detached, usually almost singsong travelogue of events in his life gave way to an impassioned narrative and plea. On the night of the murder, preoccupied, distracted, in pain with his burns and taking codeine, Nathan fell into a daze, deliriously dreaming about Hema: making a movie with her, having sex with her--"nothing abnormal," he assured me.

Getting dressed for his confrontation with Wadwhani, Nathan took pains to look good, even donning elevator shoes for additional intimidation value. To be "more persuasive," Nathan carried an MAK-90 assault rifle. Dissatisfied with the effect because the gun seemed small and compact, he put a large magazine on it. He had trouble holding it, but he wanted Wadwhani to "see it--the impressive magazine," he recalled. "It was all for show--all plastic--like something from a James Bond movie."

As he left his home to drive to Shaleen's house in Manhasset, Nathan felt like he was on a "covert mission--like special forces in Vietnam." Fully entrenched in his commando fantasy, he parked on the grass outside the Wadwhani home, making no attempt to conceal either the car or the gun. He rang the doorbell and Shaleen answered. "Hi, we have to talk," Nathan said to him. Shaleen saw the gun and, according to Nathan, "didn't look scared. He just laughed." Then, in that curious turn of mind characteristic of paranoids, Nathan projected his own motives onto Shaleen: "It was like he was playing a game. I had not intimidated him! He said not even one word and slammed the door in my face."

Slamming the door was clearly the blow that pushed Nathan over the edge.

Nathan was flooded with competing and raging emotions. He wished Hema had seen Shaleen "so disrespectful standing there in the porch light." His rival was not fit to marry Hema.

Now Nathan stopped in his narrative. He put both his hands on the table, palms up, as if in supplication; his eyes misted over. "I guess I just lost control. I didn't mean to shoot him."

All I could do was look him in the eye and listen. He choked out the words. "I never thought he would be behind the door waiting. I shot--possibly to scare him. I never thought I was hitting him. I was out of control of my emotions."

As Nathan related this tragic move, I recalled how he had flung a rock through his supervisor's storm door eight years earlier. Though he thought of himself as a careful thinker and schemer, Nathan acted on impulse. He was a machine not unlike his chosen MAK-90--set to fire automatically, repeatedly, and with a vengeance.

He was talking more that day than he had in our previous two meetings, trying hard to connect with me and make me understand. I struggled to follow the frayed thread of his logic. Nathan did have some comprehension of time and the orderly sequence of events. But as he spoke, I could see how all of his thinking became derailed by his paranoid assumptions: Hema loves me; Hema does not want to marry Wadwhani and is being forced into it; Wadwhani is a fraud with dishonorable intentions; Hema needs and wants me to protect her from him and the marriage. Once Nathan veered off from reality enough to accept this interpretation, he could leap into the fantasy world of the Ramboesque avenger. The sheer childishness and stupidity of his plan to "impress" Shaleen is ludicrous. If Shaleen had been frightened or taken him seriously and acquiesced to his wishes to talk, might his life have been spared?

Nevertheless, Nathan's disturbance had more of a literary than a clinical quality about it. Chandran Nathan was a foolish incarnation of Othello--a tragic, pompous, bumbling fool who had by his own hand destroyed what he most loved in life. But Nathan's Iago was inside his head: his own paranoid, delusional belief system, which goaded him into seeing Shaleen Wadwhani as his enemy and Hema's devotion to him as passionate love.

"How did you know Shaleen was a bad man?" I asked him.

As if offering clear and conclusive proof, Nathan shook his head in emphasis. "It was obvious that Wadwhani was a fraud. He drove a manual sports car!"

The acid test of Nathan's delusional system was that he clung to his beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Even if Hema had risen from her grave in her burial sari to express her love for Shaleen, Nathan could still explain it away. Many months after the killing, Nathan was still convinced he was in the right; in my opinion, he would always be.

The night he killed Shaleen Wadwhani, was Chandran Nathan in full possession of his faculties? Did he know the nature of his actions? Was he aware that what he was doing was wrong? When I am faced with making this sort of sad, complex determination, I constantly ask myself several basic questions, ones that will resonate throughout the pages of this book. Could this person have chosen another course of action? Were the consequences what he or she intended? Was the killer able to think far enough ahead to even know what the consequences might be? Did he or she have any kind of reasonable and informed choice at all?

It is a challenge for me to answer those questions, not only because of the twists and turns taken by the criminal mind but because of the vagaries of the criminal justice system itself. The insanity defense in practice can be as crazy and venal as those who plead innocent under it, as we struggle to distinguish the bad from the mad, the sane from the insane.

Eleven years before Chandran Nathan fired into Shaleen Wadwhani's front door, in a jurisdiction with an easier insanity defense statute, another defendant sat slumped at the table, facing the jury but somehow staring through them. Blond, blue-eyed, all-American looking yet very pale, he was strangely smaller than life in the imposing courtroom--and seemed younger than his twenty-seven years. Throughout the long days of testimony, he alternated between rolling his eyes and looking bored and out of touch.

The defendant had been born into an upwardly mobile, solidly middle-class midwestern family with traditional moral and religious values. Their home had a swimming pool, and the family room was equipped with its own Coke machine. As the trial progressed, the man in the docket would hear himself depicted as a whining, pouting mama's boy, "a wealthy, pampered suburban child who never grew up."

As adolescence approached, the young man seemed to withdraw to the sidelines--he dropped out of all sports, avoided social contacts with his peers, and was content to stay home with his mother. The family's fortunes continued to prosper. "We were the family whose American Dream had come true," he would say bitterly, after the trial had been concluded. He did not date in high school. His seclusiveness and dependence on his mother were creating conflicts in his parents' marriage. After a disastrous college experience, for the next seven years of his lonely life he bounced back and forth between pursuing various pipe dreams of success in the music business and living in his parents' home. He entered a process of withdrawal into his own world of fantasies, precipitating what psychologists call "downward drift," when mentally ill persons become less and less able to negotiate the real world and sift ever further into the cracks of society. He was being treated by a private psychiatrist who failed to realize the depths of the depression, rage, and deluded thinking that roiled his young patient.

The young man developed a rabid interest in guns and right-wing paramilitary groups. Many times he did not have money to buy food, but he continued to add impressive weapons to his personal arsenal. Even more fatal than his love of guns was his fixation upon a young movie star, whom he had met briefly on a trip to California in 1976. He became obsessed with the movie in which she played a young prostitute: Taxi Driver.

On March 30, 1981, John W. Hinckley, Jr., standing in the mist outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, sighted up his .22 caliber pistol loaded with exploding-head Devastator bullets and squeezed the trigger. Hinckley's first shot hit White House press secretary James Brady in the face, piercing his brain. His second shot struck police officer Thomas Delahanty in the back. The third shot whizzed over the head of President Ronald Reagan and lodged in a building across the street. Hinckley's fourth shot caught Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy in the chest. A fifth bullet hit the bulletproof glass of the presidential limousine, ricocheted off the rear panel of the car, and tore through the president's chest, grazing a rib and lodging in his lung, just inches from his heart.

Was the shooting a political plot, an act of terrorism, the angry outburst of a spoiled rich brat, or the delusional plan of a demented person who wished to impress an inaccessible movie star? Over the following months and the weeks of the trial, both the nation and the jury would decide: Was John Hinckley mad or bad?

The answer to that question decided far more than the fate of one troubled young man. When the jury declared Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity and the judge bundled him off to St. Elizabeth's Hospital, in Washington, D.C., America went berserk that Hinckley "got off." The resulting public outcry led to a massive stampede to "reform" the insanity defense.

Forensic examiners and the justice system go about making arbitrary, complicated, and yes, often corrupted determinations of sanity or insanity. Insanity in the sense that we discuss it in this book is not a psychological entity residing within the individual offender. In fact, the term "insanity" is not even part of the lexicon of psychiatry. No treating psychiatrist or psychologist would ever diagnose someone as "insane." The term is a legal construction. As demonstrated by the Hinckley case, the Nathan case, and many cases that are described almost daily in the pages of newspapers, insanity itself is a malleable concept, constantly remade by judges, lawyers, jurors, the media, the public, and the experts according to their own personal agendas, whether they be honest or venal.

Today, the Hinckley case is most people's point of reference for the intersection of insanity and the law. Since that 1982 verdict, all of us in the arena--the accused, the experts, the judges, juries, and attorneys--as well as the media and general public have been forced to play by different rules. And many killers fall through the cracks--from the truly mentally ill who end up in prisons, to the criminal psychopaths who fake being crazy, work the system, and elude the law.

The insanity defense has always taken on the shape of the displaced emotions of a society. Our outrage in the post-Hinckley era about the insanity defense arises from both our fear of escalating violent crime and our frustration at the failure of the criminal justice system to do anything about it.

American jurisprudence recognizes no uniform definition of insanity. Instead, there exists in America a hodgepodge of statutes and regulations across fifty states that are further affected in practice by many irrelevant variables: the sympathetic qualities of the offenders; their sex, wealth, ethnicity, and status; the emotions and prejudices of the jury; the attractiveness of the experts; the frenzy of the press; and, last, something approaching blind luck. Is it any wonder that this obscure, rarely used, and even more rarely successful defense should become a symptom for a society in disarray over the fundamental issues of individual responsibility, law over lawlessness, and personal safety and security over justice?

The insanity defense boasts a checkered past. The concept that certain mental disorders might relieve a person of responsibility for criminal conduct was first recognized as a defense in 1275 by English common law. Starting in the reign of Edward II (1307-1327), a criminal could be found insane if his defenders could demonstrate that his mental abilities were no greater than those of a "wild beast." Medieval judges and juries were assumed to have a commonsense understanding of the mentality of a wild beast.

In the mid-seventeenth century, Sir Matthew Hale, chief justice of the Court of King's Bench, redefined the notion of total insanity as having "no free will," a condition that prevailed only when "there is total defect of the understanding." A defendant could be judged insane if he possessed the understanding equivalent to a child of fourteen--not terribly restrictive in an era of short life spans, when human beings had to mature quickly. During the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment, a defendant's level of knowledge of wrongfulness, his capacity to distinguish good from evil, became the touchstone of a definition of insanity.

Copyright © 1997 Barbara R. Kirwin, Ph.D.. All rights reserved.