Court to hear case on criminal insanity
Published 9:00 pm Monday, December 5, 2005
WASHINGTON – How hard can states make it for criminal defendants to prove insanity?
The Supreme Court, jumping into an issue it avoided for nearly two decades, said Monday it would hear an appeal filed on behalf of a teenager who apparently thought he was being pursued by aliens when he killed an Arizona police officer. The justices will take up the case in the spring.
| Court news
In other action Monday, the Supreme Court: * Refused to weigh in on a dispute between the Hells Angels motorcyclists and California law enforcement agencies over the shooting of three family pets during a police search. * Agreed to decide how much authority employers have in transferring workers who claim discrimination. * Declined to consider whether school districts can use race as a factor in assigning elementary and secondary students to schools beyond their neighborhoods. * Turned down an appeal filed by Utah to restore a set of laws blocking a nuclear waste repository at the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation near Salt Lake City. |
The man’s lawyer, David Goldberg, said in a filing that Arizona lawmakers made their law too restrictive. It allows a defendant to be found “guilty except insane” and held for mental health treatment, but it restricts what evidence can be used to prove insanity.
It’s the first time the court has dealt with a direct constitutional challenge to insanity defense laws since lawmakers around the country imposed new restrictions following John Hinckley’s acquittal by reason of insanity in the March 1981 shooting of President Reagan, said Richard Bonnie, a University of Virginia professor who specializes in psychiatry and the law.
“It comes as a surprise,” Bonnie said.
Most, but not all, states allow insanity defenses. In 1994, the Supreme Court let stand Montana’s abolition of insanity as a defense for criminal defendants. But then three years ago justices refused to review a Nevada Supreme Court decision that defendants have a right to use insanity defenses.
The latest Supreme Court case involves Eric Michael Clark, who was a standout football player and popular student until he started acting bizarrely.
In 1999, he began obsessing about the millennium. He ran up his parents’ credit cards buying survival supplies and then became convinced that aliens had taken over his town.
Clark, who has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, shot Officer Jeff Moritz in Flagstaff, Ariz., on June 21, 2000. Moritz had pulled Clark over as the 17-year-old drove around his neighborhood in a truck playing loud rap music about 5 a.m.
Clark was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
Clark is not contesting his guilt in shooting the officer, Goldberg said. “It is just whether in fairness, he should be doing his time in a maximum security prison or in a mental health facility.”
