Tag: Insanity Defense

Daniel M’Naghten was an Englishman that suffered from paranoid delusions who thought that the Tories were going to kill him. He murdered the Prime Minister’s Secretary, Mr. Drummond and was acquitted under an insanity defense later codified in the House of Lords in 1843. This insanity defense became common law and is known as the M’Naghten Rule — a 2 prong test with the 1st prong determining whether or not the defendant knew what they were doing and the 2nd prong determining if the defendant knew what they were doing was morally ‘wrong.’  

• Kansas adopted the M’Naghten Rule in 1884.
• There was an assassination attempt on President Reagan in 1981.
• John Hinckley Jr. was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1982.
• Kansas lawmakers abolished the M’Naghten Rule in 1996.

From Marc Rosen, “First, abolition of the insanity defense in Kansas was unwarranted. The Kansas Legislature abolished the defense because the public wanted it abolished. Yet the public was, and still is, remarkably uninformed about the actual use of the insanity defense. The public’s call for abolition was based on several misperceptions that were either empirically untrue or unjustified. Instead of educating the public on the actual use of the insanity defense, the Kansas Legislature catered to the public’s misperceptions by abolishing the defense.”

We took a narrow mens rea approach for the ‘guilty mind.’

KSA § 21-5209. It shall be a defense to a prosecution under any statute that the defendant, as a result of mental disease or defect, lacked the culpable mental state required as an element of the crime charged. Mental disease or defect is not otherwise a defense.

KSA § 21-5202. Except as otherwise provided, a culpable mental state is an essential element of every crime defined by this code. A culpable mental state may be established by proof that the conduct of the accused person was committed “intentionally,” “knowingly” or “recklessly.”

“There is a 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. Therefore, the defense cannot introduce evidence as to the existence of a mental disease or defect to litigate the defendant’s mental condition in general.”

A 2020 Harvard Review also notes “This narrow mens rea approach forbids enshrined ‘moral capacity’ argument for vulnerable minorities. In Kansas, a mentally ill defendant who lacks ‘cognitive capacity’ (who, for example, thinks the person she is killing is a hat) can argue that she lacked mens rea, but a defendant who lacks “moral capacity” (who, for example, believes she is justifiably drowning her children to save them from eternal hell) has no ‘insanity defense.’”

“Oh, but sentencing can be altered with mental health evidence,” one might say. 

Mental health evidence can typically be considered at sentencing but does not require a sentence be modified in a particular way. For sentencing guideline felony convictions it can be the basis for a downward durational or dispositional departure. Reducing the prison term or granting probation. For office grid murders it can be used for a departure from a 50 years to life prison sentence to a 25 years to life sentence. For capital murder charges it can be presented as a mitigating circumstance for a life without parole sentence as opposed to a death sentence.

There is little opportunity for treatment.  

Restore the M’Naghten Rule:

• Broadens our insanity defense.
• FY 2023 KDOC Report – 46% of adult inmates have mental illness.
• We’re building a psych hospital in Wichita to add secure beds.
• Public perceptions of individuals with mental illness are evolving.

We’re Stepping Up Together! 

Over the last 9 years 20 Kansas counties took up the Stepping Up initiative!

For my peers with mental illness going through criminal proceedings, please restore the M’Naghten Rule in Kansas.

One of our gracious representatives gave me permission to work with a reviser on drafting a new bill this session to restore an insanity defense in Kansas and I’m so grateful to Rep. Carmichael for this opportunity to advocate for my peers with mental illness going through criminal court proceedings. When the reviser gives me that all clear, I’m introducing it into the House Judiciary Committee and hopefully, we’ll get a hearing on the bill. Cross your fingers ♥

We got a bill, but there was little time to schedule a hearing for it. Sometimes these things take a while, and we will continue with the mission through next session. In the meantime, I’ve been applying for ARPA dollars to benefit our unsheltered, homeless persons as they lost resources due to COVID restrictions. They need sleeping bags, heavy coats, boots, hand and body warmers.

Am I Going Insane, or Did #Kansas Abolish the Insanity Defense? https://t.co/ZpLBXvixec

— Shawnee County Mercy Advocates, Inc. (@CountyMercy) November 5, 2021

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

Opinion analysis: Majority upholds Kansas scheme for mentally ill defendants https://t.co/3vzI9wgKOn

— Shawnee County Mercy Advocates, Inc. (@CountyMercy) February 16, 2021

The following is an excerpt from “Abolition of the Insanity Defense Violates Due Process” by Stephen J. Morse, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and Richard J. Bonnie, University of Virginia School of Law.

Blame and punishment by the state are fundamentally unfair and thus a violation of the Due Process Clause if an offender was not responsible for his crime. The affirmative defense of legal insanity applies this fundamental principle by excusing those mentally disordered offenders whose disorder deprived them of rational understanding of their conduct at the time of the crime. This principle is simple but profound. Indeed, in recognition of it, the
insanity defense has been a feature of ancient law and of English law since the 14th century. It was universal in the United States until the last decades of the 20th century, and there is still a near consensus among state and federal lawmakers that the defense must be retained.

The concept of responsibility connects with our most fundamental convictions about human nature and dignity and our everyday experience of guilt and innocence and blame and punishment. It also explains our common aversion to the idea that we might simply be like machines responding to neural activities in the brain and our resistance to thinking of all wrongdoing as sickness. Failing to provide an insanity defense confounds the meaning of what it is
to be responsible for one’s actions. It cheapens the idea of being a responsible person by classifying and holding responsible persons intuitively regarded as fundamentally non-responsible.

In both law and morals, the capacity for reason is the primary foundation for responsibility and competence. The precise cognitive deficit a person must exhibit can, of course, vary from context to context. In the criminal justice system, an offender who lacks the capacity to understand the wrongfulness of his actions as the result of severe mental disorder does not deserve full blame and punishment and must be excused in a sufficiently extreme case. Moreover, such offenders cannot be appropriately deterred because the rules of law and morality cannot adequately guide them. Failing to excuse some mentally disordered offenders is inconsistent with both retributive and deterrent theories of just punishment.

A similar baseline principle explains the many competence doctrines employed in the criminal justice process. This Court has long recognized that, at every stage, justice demands that some people with severe mental abnormalities must be treated differently from those without substantial mental impairment, because some impaired defendants are incapable of reason and understanding in a specific context. Competence to stand trial, competence to plead
guilty and to waive counsel, competence to represent oneself and competence to be executed are all examples in which the Constitution requires such special treatment. It is unfair to the defendant and offensive to the dignity of criminal justice to treat people without understanding as if their understanding was unimpaired. Evidence of mental disorder is routinely introduced in all these contexts to determine whether the defendant must be accorded special treatment.

Legally insane offenders are not excused solely because they had a severe mental disorder at the time of the crime. The mental disorder must also impair their ability to understand or appreciate that what
they are doing is wrong or some other functional capacity that a jurisdiction believes is crucial to responsibility. The criminal acts of those found legally insane do not result from bad judgment, insufficient moral sense, bad attitudes, or bad characters, none of
which is an excusing condition. Rather, the crimes of legally insane offenders arise from a lack of understanding produced by severe mental abnormality and thus they do not reflect culpable personal qualities and actions. To convict such people offends the basic sense of justice.

The impact of mental disorder on an offender’s responsibility and competence is recognized throughout criminal law. Even the few jurisdictions that have abolished the insanity defense recognize
that mental disorder affects criminal responsibility because it permits the introduction of evidence of mental disorder to negate the mens rea for the crime charged. As the Supreme Court has recognized,
state infliction of stigmatization and punishment is a severe infringement. The insanity defense is grounded in long-recognized legal and moral principles and on routinely admissible evidence. Even if a defendant formed the charged mens rea, it is unfair to preclude a defendant from claiming and proving that he was not at fault as a result of lack of understanding arising from a severely disordered mind.

Historical practice, the near universal acceptance of the need for an independent affirmative defense of legal insanity and the fundamental unfairness of blaming and punishing legally insane offenders provide the strongest reasons to conclude that fundamental fairness and the Due Process Clause require
an insanity defense. Abolishing this narrowly defined and deeply rooted defense could plausibly be justified only if an alternative legal approach could reach the same just result or if irremediably deep flaws preclude fair and accurate administration of the defense.