Restore Insanity Defense in Kansas
The FY2020 Kansas Department of Corrections Annual Report notes that 40% of our total prison population suffers from mental illness, with the majority of inmates diagnosed with serious mental illness, a condition that interrupts daily routine and requires managed care.
Did you know that the state of Kansas abolished the insanity defense in 1995? Since 1884, Kansas courts had employed the M’Naghten Rule as an affirmative defense of insanity, but now legislators were asked to do away with fundamental, common law.
Per K.S.A. 22-3220, now, K.S.A. 21-5209, a defendant can enter a plea of mental defect to trigger the prosecution’s burden to prove mens rea or criminal intent. If the prosecution can prove that the defendant intended a crime, they have a “guilty mind.” Mental disease or defect is not otherwise a defense.
In McLinn v. Kansas, one notion brought up by the prosecutor was a supposed, purposeful force Sarah McLinn used to sever Hal Sasko’s head. This supposed, purposeful force satisfied a criminal intent to determine a “culpable mental state,” but Sarah, diagnosed with multiple personalities, couldn’t enter into evidence her pathology as a defense.
In his 1998 criticism of the Kansas abolition of the insanity defense, Marc Rosen explains “there is one major limitation on the defendant’s ability to introduce evidence corroborating or showing the existence of a mental disease or defect. Such evidence is only admissible as it specifically relates to the requisite mens rea of the offense.”
Now KDOC wants taxpayer dollars for the needs of mentally ill inmates when we have funded state hospitals to treat defendants. It is time to restore an insanity defense in Kansas.
Keri Strahler, Topeka