Neither of the two ways to defend the insanity plea — absolutist nor relativist — appear to be sound. We need to find a way out of this because it seems intuitively true that there are people out there who are, well, insane. It would appear monstrous to punish them for actions when they are certainly so far gone that they shouldn’t be held morally culpable for practically anything.
Fortunately, there is a possible solution, and one which is hinted at in the previous quotes from the Resnick testimony: why did Andrea Yates think that she was following a “higher good”? It appears that she believed that she was doing the right thing because killing them would send them to heaven and thereby save them from Satan, whom Yates believed dwelt within her. Satan would, then, be destroyed when she was executed — everyone wins.
The key to look for here is why Yates (and people like her) believed that it would serve a higher moral cause to break the law. If Yates looked at the same facts as the rest of us see and simply came to a different conclusion, it would be difficult to label her insane — we stumble across the problem of labeling all “different” people as insane.
Where “insanity” comes into play is the point at which a person’s perception of reality diverges too far from actual reality. We all see things differently and arrive at different interpretations, which means that we must allow for some variety in what people believe. However, there are points at which it is legitimate to question someone’s sanity — a point at which we aren’t all looking at the same facts because someone is seeing things which aren’t really there.
This principle is actually articulated in the original M’Naughten rule, although it is often ignored and is rarely included in modern formulations. According to the original rule, it was possible to find a defendant not morally responsible if they were suffering from delusions which, if the delusions were true, would serve as a defense of and justification for their actions.
Thus, if your delusions lead you to honestly believe that Joe was trying to kill you and you killed Joe in “self-defense,” then your insanity plea would work. On the other hand, if your delusions lead you to believe that Joe was simply trying to steal your pet dog, that alone would not suffice as a valid insanity defense for having killed him.
To take once again the example of the Andrea Yates case, did she hear voices in her head, telling her that Satan lived in her and that her kids were in danger? Did she look in the mirror and see an image of Satan looking back, laughing and mocking her attempts to protect her kids? If so, it is reasonable to judge that she was not experiencing reality and was, instead, experiencing a mental illness.
Moreover, it is may be reasonable to conclude that if her delusions had been real, then her actions were justified responses. Given such experiences, it would not have been unreasonable for her to consider the actions she eventually took — thus, she cannot be found insane because she was acting irrationally or simply because her standards different from society.
What we have here is a malfunction of the brain, feeding the person completely false information. In such a situation, even a person with intact reasoning would arrive at bad conclusions — but when a person’s reasoning is not functioning properly, matters will proceed from bad to worse at a much quicker pace. There is room in the criminal justice system for an insanity plea, if we are willing to define and apply it appropriately.
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