In the case of John Hinckley, if you did not already know what he did, you would be hard-pressed to find anything in his background that would lead him to commit such an extreme act of violence. Hinckley was the youngest of three children, the son of a stay-at-home mom and a workaholic father prominent in the oil business. His mother described him as clinging and dependent. In reviewing JoAnn and Jack Hinckley’s autobiographical book about their son and family, Breaking Points, Laura Obolensky wrote in the New Republic:
Perhaps it is fear of what lies outside that makes the interior of the family so rigid and subdued, like life in a well-run bunker. The world of the Hinckleys was the rootless, middle-class Sunbelt culture that nurtures pro-family values, Christian fundamentalism, and occasional mass murderers. Families move frequently, but without compromising their parochialism. Everywhere, people are white, Christian, Republican (JoAnn explains John’s egregious prejudices by saying he had “never been around people of other races”). Somewhere outside there are malign elements—minority groups, rock musicians, big government, and the cynical, Godless cosmopolites who dominate the media. Mothers in this culture do not lavish attention on their children, but on their furniture.10
Affectless? Yes. Cold and uncaring? Perhaps. Progenitor of an assassin? Hardly.
Upon graduating from high school, Hinckley muddled through two years of college at Texas Tech, in Lubbock, watching television, playing guitar, and finally dropping out in the spring of 1976. Like so many aspiring entertainers before and after him, Hinckley moved to Hollywood, where he saw Jodie Foster’s debut in Taxi Driver, a movie he watched fifteen times over the next couple of years. In the film, Foster plays a young prostitute rescued from her pimp by a psychotic taxi driver named Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro. Hinckley identified with Bickle, adopting the mannerisms (“you talkin’ to me?”) and dress of the character (who, significantly, contemplated committing a political assassination), even to the point of keeping a diary, wearing army fatigues and boots, and developing an obsession with guns. More importantly, the film spawned in Hinckley an obsession for Foster.
A year later, Hinckley abandoned his musical aspirations and returned to Texas, wandering aimlessly as his depression deepened. A year after that, he bought his first gun and took up target shooting, and by the fall of 1979, he later confessed, he had twice played Russian roulette. Matters took a more sinister turn in the summer of 1980, when he convinced his parents to finance a writing course at Yale University where, not by chance, Foster was enrolled as a student. A distant obsession now turned to physical stalking, as Hinckley left Foster poems and letters, and twice phoned her.
His awkward love unrequited, Hinckley now considered a political assassination to get Foster’s attention. His first target of choice was President Jimmy Carter. Hinckley tailed him on the 1980 campaign trail in Washington, D.C., as well as in Columbus and Dayton, Ohio. He later admitted that he couldn’t get into “a frame of mind where I could actually carry out the act,” so he returned to Yale to make another attempt at winning Foster’s love, and once again failed. He was subsequently arrested for carrying handguns in his suitcase through the Nashville airport, but was released without incident.
With his parents’ tuition money spent, Hinckley returned home and overdosed (but recovered) on antidepressants. His parents arranged for Hinckley to see a psychiatrist, but there was apparently no hint in their sessions of the level of Hinckley’s obsession, or that he was on the brink of attempting suicide or murder. His depression deepening, Hinckley traveled to New York and considered killing himself on the same spot where John Lennon had been assassinated a few weeks earlier by another obsessed young man named Mark David Chapman. On New Year’s Eve of 1980, Hinckley recorded a rambling message in which he spoke of not “really” wanting “to hurt” Foster and that he might kill himself if Foster would not return his affections. He finally decided he would take down Reagan, as he carefully explained to Foster in a never-sent letter: “Jodie, I would abandon this idea of getting Reagan in a second if I could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life with you … . I will admit to you that the reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you. I’ve got to do something now to make you understand, in no uncertain terms, that I am doing this for your sake! By sacrificing my freedom and possibly my life, I hope to change your mind about me. This letter is being written only an hour before I leave for the Hilton Hotel. Jodie, I’m asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance, with this historic deed, to gain your respect and love.”
After shooting Reagan, Hinckley was promptly arrested on the spot and transferred to the federal penitentiary in Butner, North Carolina, for a psychiatric evaluation. Although the initial assessment of Hinckley indicated that he was sane, two suicide attempts in his cell and his demand to his attorneys that they get Foster to testify on his behalf indicated that perhaps his mind was not functioning within normal operating parameters. (Foster did provide a videotaped testimony, but not one Hinckley saw as favorable to his cause, which was more focused on winning her love than winning his freedom.)
As the trial got under way, and with the hindsight bias in full display, attorneys, psychiatrists, jurors, and observers searched in vain for “the cause” of Hinckley’s actions. Hinckley’s attorney, Vince Fuller, attempted to glean from Hinckley’s mother some glitch in his upbringing or an action that could have been a clue to the imminent assassination attempt. In fact, just months before the shooting, she had told Hinckley’s psychiatrist, Dr. Hopper, “Things are fine.” Hinckley’s father testified that the last time he saw John he told him, “O.K., you are on your own. Do whatever you want to do.” In retrospect, and with the hindsight bias driving him to despair, Jack Hinckley lamented, “I’m sure that it was the greatest mistake in my life. I am the cause of John’s tragedy—I forced him out at a time when he simply couldn’t cope. I wish to God that I could trade places with him right now.” After the fact, anyone can be a Monday morning psychiatrist. Science requires predictions, not postdictions.
In her testimony, Foster said Hinckley’s first sets of letters to her were “lover-type letters,” but that the later letters were “distress-sounding” and “I gave them to the dean of my college.” In a missive dated March 6, 1981, for example, just three weeks before the shooting, Hinckley wrote, “Jodie Foster, love, just wait. I will rescue you very soon. Please cooperate. J. W. H.” Asked whether she’d “ever seen a message like that before,” Foster replied, “Yes, in the movie Taxi Driver the character Travis Bickle sends the character Iris [Foster’s role] a rescue letter.”
Hinckley’s lead psychiatrist for his defense was Dr. William Carpenter. After forty-five hours of conversation with Hinckley, Carpenter concluded that he showed four major symptoms of mental illness: “an incapacity to have an ordinary emotional arousal,” “autistic retreat from reality,” depression including “suicidal features,” and an inability to work or establish social bonds. Hinckley’s inability to properly identify with real people, Carpenter explained, led him to emulate Taxi Driver’s Bickle. Alone in his college dorm room and playing his guitar, he also identified with John Lennon. When the pop star was assassinated, Hinckley’s self-identification was discombobulated. His New Year’s Eve monologue, said Carpenter, indicated just how deep his insanity had gone. Here is what Hinckley said:
John Lennon is dead. The world is over. Forget it. It’s just gonna be insanity, if I even make it through the first few days … . I still regret having to go on with 1981 … . I don’t know why people wanna live … . John Lennon is dead … . I still think—I still think about Jodie all the time. That’s all I think about really. That, and John Lennon’s death. They were sorta binded together … .
Hinckley’s identification then switched from Lennon back to the fictional Bickle, indicated by his signature in the guest register at the hotel where he stayed after his father refused to let him return
home: “J. Travis.”
Another psychiatrist for the defense, Dr. David Bear, concurred with Carpenter that Hinckley was psychotic, suffering from Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder and an extreme reaction to Valium called Paradoxical Rage. For example, Hinckley believed that the character Bickle was talking to him through the film. It was “like he was acting out a movie script,” Bear explained. Could he have been faking his symptoms? Not likely, Bear answered, because imposters fake both positive and negative emotions, whereas Hinckley exhibited only negative emotions. The prosecution challenged that the never-sent letter to Foster proved that Hinckley had planned to shoot the president, but Bear denied that it was a rational plan: “This is so much the heart of the issue—a logical man plans, Hinckley simply reacted, the very opposite of logic. Do I conclude he was rational in plan? My God, my sense of justice says absolutely not.” A CAT scan of Hinckley’s brain was also introduced into evidence by Bear, who said that widened sulci in his brain were “powerful evidence” of his schizophrenia, because only about 2 percent of the general population show widened sulci, whereas about one-third of schizophrenics do. Finally, Hinckley’s score on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory indicated that he was near the top of the range for abnormality. According to one expert, only one person out of a million with Hinckley’s score would not be suffering from serious mental illness. Case closed.
Or was it? The government’s psychiatric team drew a rather different conclusion. While Hinckley may exhibit numerous personality disorders and has some obviously unlikable traits, they argued, he was not insane. His flying about the country, purchasing handguns and ammunition, and plotting the place and timing of Reagan’s assassination all indicated that he was rational and organized. How different really was his identification with John Lennon from that of thousands of crazed rock fans? Was it really an “obsession” with Jodie Foster or just an exaggerated form of infatuation exhibited by so many young adults for celebrities? Hinckley, the prosecution argued, was a bored, spoiled, lazy, manipulative rich kid and little more: “Mr. Hinckley’s history is clearly indicative of a person who did not function in a usual reasonable manner. However, there is no evidence that he was so impaired that he could not appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.” Hinckley said as much in a deposition with the prosecution. Basically, he explained, he just wanted to be famous so he could get Foster’s attention and affection. “It worked. You know, actually, I accomplished everything I was going for there. Actually, I should feel good because I accomplished everything on a grand scale … . I didn’t get any big thrill out of killing—I mean shooting—him. I did it for her sake … . The movie isn’t over yet.”
The movie came to an end after eight weeks of evidence and arguments. The jury was instructed by Judge Barrington Parker that the prosecution had the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Hinckley was not insane and that on the day of the assassination attempt he could appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions. After three days of deliberation the jury concluded that the prosecution had failed to do so, returning the same verdict for all thirteen counts: not guilty by reason of insanity.
The trial captured the paradox of moral determinism. After the verdict, the public was outraged; the jury had acquitted a man whose crime had been witnessed by everyone in the country on national television. Lawmakers promised to launch an investigation into the insanity plea. One reporter sardonically labeled his insanity “dementia suburbia,” because Hinckley was from a well-to-do suburban family. Nevertheless, the day after the trial Hinckley was placed in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, where he has resided ever since, continually denied parole. In 1985 Hinckley returned to court to request grounds privileges and to lift the hospital ban on his access to telephones. His obsession with Foster was finally over, he told the judge. But it wasn’t true. Hinckley had previously written a letter to Time magazine, claiming, “The most important thing in my life is Jodie Foster’s love and admiration. If I can’t have them, neither can anyone else. We are a historical couple, like Napoleon and Josephine, and a romantic couple like Romeo and Juliet.” The judge denied his request. A search of his room during another hearing on privileges, in 1987, turned up twenty photographs of Foster and numerous writings about her, along with correspondence with serial killer Ted Bundy. Hinckley had even attempted to contact Charles Manson. Even nearly a decade and a half later, his obsession had not diminished. In 2000, shortly after he earned the right to unsupervised furloughs, a search of his room uncovered a book about Foster, and he was once again confined to quarters.
Within a month of the Hinckley verdict, the legal world was awash in debate on the question of moral culpability. The House and Senate held hearings, and Senator Arlen Specter proposed shifting the burden of proof of insanity from the prosecution to the defense. Even Reagan commented, “If you start thinking about even a lot of your friends, you would have to say, ‘Gee, if I had to prove they were sane, I would have a hard job.’” Within three years, two-thirds of the states made that shift on the burden of proof. Utah abolished the defense entirely, and eight other states changed the plea to “guilty but mentally ill.” In 1984 legislation was passed requiring a defendant to prove that the “severe” mental disease made him “unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts.”
Moral Determinism and the Law
The insanity defense is based on the moral psychological theory that most people most of the time in most circumstances freely choose to follow the law, but that a few people, in certain times and circumstances, and under particular mental duress or disease, cannot make that choice. Therefore, the traditional punishment of prison is inappropriate, because how can you punish someone for an act they did not voluntarily choose to commit?
The legal awareness that there is a paradox of moral determinism dates back to 1843 when an apparently psychotic man named Daniel M‘Naghten attempted to assassinate British prime minister Robert Peel, under the paranoid belief that he was being persecuted. Foreshadowing the Hinckley trial, M’Naghten pleaded insanity, while the prosecution argued that his behaviors indicated volition because of the planning needed to execute the attack. Several physicians provided expert testimony that M‘Naghten was insane, and the court agreed. The ensuing legal brouhaha (which included Queen Victoria and the House of Lords protesting the outcome of the trial) led to a set of criteria by which jurors were to judge the sanity or insanity of a defendant. These became known as the M’Naghten Test, which was in place in both the United Kingdom and the United States through the early 1960s. In brief, the M’Naghten Test of moral insanity includes a “right-wrong test” in which jurors were to ask themselves two questions: (1) did the defendant know what he was doing when he committed the crime? or (2) did the defendant understand that his actions were wrong? Jurors “ought to be told in all cases that every man is to be presumed to be sane, and to possess a sufficient degree of reason to be responsible for his crimes, until the contrary be proved to their satisfaction; and that, to establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.”
Over time different jurisdictions modified the M’Naghten Test, some adding an “irresistible impulse” clause where defendants could be acquitted even if they knew an act was wrong but could prove that they could not stop themselves from committing it. The psychological theory behind this addendum was that some forms of mental illness are so powerful that they can cause a person to act against his or her better judgment. It is not simply “I knew this was wrong, but I wanted to do it anyway,” but, rather, “I knew this was wrong, but I could not stop myself from doing it anyway.” Critics argued that this clause meant anyone could claim irresi
stible impulses and that the whole point of social laws and moral codes is to curb those impulses. Where do you draw the line between normal resistible and abnormal irresistible impulses?
This conundrum led to the Durham Test, which arose out of the Washington, D.C., 1954 case of Durham v. United States. The Durham Test was a modification of the M’Naghten Test, in which jurors were now to ask themselves these two questions: (1) did the defendant have a mental disease or defect? and (2) if so, was the disease or defect the reason for the unlawful act? To return a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, both answers had to be in the affirmative. The psychological theory behind the Durham Test was that mental illness was a disease that took control of a person’s moral volition. The Durham Test, however, never quite caught on, and by 1972 the D.C. Circuit out of which it originally arose abandoned the test and in its stead adopted the American Law Institute (ALI) Test, a more flexible model designed to recognize degrees of incapacity. Instead of a binary choice of knowing or not knowing the difference between right and wrong, defendants could show degrees of moral and psychological incapacity. Specifically, it stated: “The concept of belief in freedom of the human will and a consequent ability and duty of the normal individual to choose between good and evil is a core concept that is universal and persistent in mature systems of law.” The presumption is that good and evil actions are choices made by volitional beings. Thus, “Criminal responsibility is assessed when through free will a man elects to do evil.” Free will holds us accountable. Abandon free will in favor of determinism and moral culpability flies out the courtroom window.
Science of Good and Evil Page 14