Anyone who murders someone, when it is not in self-defense, is insane. Therefore, if you accept the premise that some murderers shouldn’t be prosecuted because of insanity, then we might as well invalidate all the murder laws and just send all the murderers to psychiatric hospitals, where they’ll get red-carpet treatment (at the taxpayers’ expense) and eventually be released back into society when some quack psychiatrist deems them “rehabilitated.”
I mean, how is the system to determine who is truly “insane” as opposed to the kind of moral insanity that all murderers have? It depends on the quality of the attorney representing the murderer (often a public defender) and on the judge, who may incline to the more sympathetic side. All of which makes for a very unfair, arbitrary justice system that threatens public safety and abandons the notion of retribution.
These thoughts today were prompted by reports that the man who murdered Coach John Beam, at Laney College, was just declared insane, and thus mentally unfit to stand trial, for his wretched, awful deed. The murderer, Cedric Irving Jr., has had at least four mental competency hearings, which tells me that this whole process is fraught with problems. How hard can it be to establish whether or not someone is insane? If it all comes down to someone’s opinion, then mine is that the insanity defense is almost never justified. How many murderers are out there who have completed their time in a mental facility, and were then released back into public after being found “competent” again?
Sometimes these alleged mental cases, when they’re found not guilty due to insanity, are given mandatory treatment meant to rehabilitate them. According to published accounts, “If [Irving] is unable to regain competency after two years of treatment, Irving may be placed into state conservatorships.” But these conservatorships are rife with abuse. Earlier this week CalMatters revealed that the state agency responsible for overseeing conservatorships “has failed to fulfill its vital promise to protect Californians,” has violated its own code of conduct, has reported “secret and/or inaccurate information,” and has failed to cite dishonest fiduciaries, who steal money from the people they supposed to represent. Even when the agency does prosecute crooked fiduciaries, it can take more than two years for the agency to suspend the fiduciary’s license.
The insanity defense is not commonly used in California, accounting for just a handful of cases each year. And only in about one-quarter of defenses is it successful. Still, one has to be concerned with its potential for fraud and abuse. Juries in certain jurisdictions, such as Oakland, tend to be more sympathetic to indigent, “mentally ill” defendants, while soft-on-crime prosecutors, such as Pamela Price, may decide against pressing charges if the defense appears ready to mount a mental-illness case. When she was first running for District Attorney, Price “promised to work aggressively" to move cases involving mental illness into diversion programs rather than seeking standard prison sentences. She even created a Mental Health Commission aimed at finding alternatives to mass incarceration for those with psychiatric conditions. Price justified her move by saying, “We want to treat people suffering with mental health issues with the care and responsible justice they deserve,” and called her new commission “a step in the right direction in providing alternatives to mass incarceration.” Yet those “alternatives” often involved taking dangerous felons, giving them a slap on the wrist, and then releasing them back into the general population.
You can see how problematic this issue is. The insanity defense is not only abused by unscrupulous lawyers and public defenders, it’s misused by progressive DAs like Price to keep criminals from facing the consequences of their crimes. Remember, we recalled Price (and San Franciscans recalled Chesa Boudin) for precisely this reason: they were soft on crime, and preferred to release lawbreakers rather than prosecute them. Surely this insanity defense is one area of the law that is in need of repair. We can start by making it even harder to mount an insanity defense in the first place, and we can identify soft-on-crime DAs and judges who repeatedly turn violent criminals loose.
Steve Heimoff