The Mind and the Deed Anthony Kenny - We ascribe actions to choices, and we invoke, to explain their conduct, various intentions, motives and reasons. o These mentalist concepts, such as desire, belief, intention, motive, and reason, are the subject matter of the philosophy of mind. - Actions are sometimes the subject of moral and legal evaluation: o Some actions we regard as admirable and praiseworthy o Others we condemn and punish as criminal. - Crimes, like other actions, involve a mental element. o For this mental element lawyers have a special name:  Mens rea, which is the Latin for “guilty mind” o This “guilty mind” need not be any consciousness of wickedness or any malevolent intent:  In most cases it is simply a knowledge of what one is doing, where what one is doing is something illegal. o The particular mental state indicated by mens rea differs, as we shall see, from crime to crime:  The expression means, in general, the state of mind which must accompany an act which is on the face of it criminal if the agent is to be held responsible, and therefore liable for punishment, for the action. - For several reasons the notion of responsibility and the cluster of concepts that combineto provide its habitat have been looked on with disfavor in recent years. o They look forward to a time when law courts are replaced by something more scientific and clinical:  When the determination of responsibility and the handing down of penalties by judicial bodies is replaced by the diagnosis of social illness and the prescription of appropriate medicinal procedures by teams of social scientists.Transcript, Criminal Trial of John Hinckley (1982) - The verdict of “not guilty” for reason of insanity in the 1982 trial of John Hinckley Jr. for his attempted assassination of President Ronald Regan stunned and outraged many Americanso Many people blamed a legal system that they claimed made it too easy for juries to return “not guilty” verdicts in insanity cases Public pressure resulting from the Hinckley verdict spurred Congress and most states into enacting major reforms of laws governing the use of the insanity defense. - The Hinckley trial highlights the difficulty of a system that forces jurors to label a defendant either “sane” or “insane” when the defendant may in fact be close to the middle. o The prosecution contended that Hinckley suffered only from “personality disorders” of the type affecting give to ten percent of the population, whereas the defense saw the same evidence as demonstrating Hinckley’s serious mental illness. - The Hinckley trial, perhaps better than any other famous trial, reveals the difficulty of ascertaining what exactly is going on in the head of another human being – and then in using that imperfect knowledge to answer a legal question that reduces complex and changing mental states to two oversimplified categories. The Troubled Life of John Hinckley - The youngest of three children born to a workaholic oil executive and an agoraphobic stay-at-home mother, John Hinckley from an early age was very clingy and very dependent on his mother. The Assassination - Hinckley emptied the six bullets in his gun in rapid succession. - The sixth and final bullet nearly killed the President. The Trial - With dozens of witnesses and the shootings captured on videotape, the government knew as well as John Hinckley’s own defense lawyer, Vince Fuller, that the only plausible defense was the insanity defense. - When the psychiatric reports came in, there were no surprises. o All the government psychiatrists concluded that Hinckley was legally sane – that he appreciated the wrongfulness of his act – at the time of the shooting.  All three defense psychiatrists diagnosed Hinckley as psychotic – and legally insane – at the time of the shooting. - The first phase of the prosecution case, uncontested by the defense, established the obvious: o That a shooting had occurred and that Hinckley had done the shooting.- When the prosecution rested its formal case, the real trial – the insanity trial – began. - From forty-five hours of conversation with John Hinckley, lead psychiatric expert for the defense, Dr. William Carpenter, concluded the defendant suffered from schizophrenia. o He saw Hinckley as having four major symptoms of mental illness:  An incapacity to have an ordinary emotional arousal  Autistic retreat from reality  Depression including “suicidal features”  An inability to work or establish social bonds. - Carpenter ended three days of testimony by concluding that Hinckley could appreciate the wrongfulness of his act “intellectually,” but not emotionally. o To him, the President and the others he shot were just “bit players.”  So focused was he on achieving a “magical unification with Jodie Foster” that he didn’t see the consequences of his action for his victims. - Judge Barrington Parker ended the eight weeks of evidence and arguments by reading his instructions to the jury. o Most importantly, Parker told the jurors that the prosecution had the burden of showing beyond a reasonable doubt that Hinckley was not insane:  That on March 30, 1981 he could appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions. o Parker did not tell the jury should reach its conclusion by focusing solely on Hinckley’s intellectual awareness of the wrongfulness of his action, as the prosecution suggested, or by some broader notion that included emotional appreciation of wrongfulness. - The same verdict for each of the thirteen counts was not guilty by reason of insanity. Insanity Defense Reform in the Trial Aftermath - Within a month of the Hinckley verdict, the House and Senate were holding hearings on the insanity defense o A measure proposed by Senator Arlen Specter shifted the burden of proof of insanity to the defense. - Joining Congress in shifting the burden of proof were a number of states. o Within three years after the Hinckley verdict, two-thirds of the states placed the burden on the defense to prove insanity, while eight states adopted a separate verdict of “guilty but mentally ill,” and one state (Utah) abolished the defense altogether. - In addition to shifting the burden in insanity cases, Congress also narrowed the defense itself. o Legislation passed in 1984 required the defendant to prove a “severe” mental disease and eliminated the “volitional” or “control” aspect of the