Insanity Pleas & Capital Punishment

There appears to be a decent solution to the defense of the insanity plea, but that solution is not as clean and neat as it might initially appear. It certainly gives us a better foundation for deciding whether or not a person might be insane because most people can agree that when a person experiences not reality but rather some strange un-reality, then there is something wrong with them.

The problem which arises for us is religious in nature: religions traditionally rely upon religious experiences. Those experiences, in turn, often involve hearing voices and having visions — not unlike the visions and voices experienced by the mentally ill. Assuming that there exist voices and visions which are genuine manifestations of something supernatural, like a god, how do we differentiate between those and the experiences which are caused by a malfunctioning brain?

This is important, because it would not be just to label a person “insane” and lock them away in a mental institution when they experienced genuine revelations from God. To put it another way, what if Yates is correct? What if Satan does dwell within her and she did have to kill her kids so that they could be assured of heaven? Obviously, we shouldn’t punish her — instead, perhaps we should celebrate her.

Just as obviously, though, no one in America does this — especially the evangelical Christians who traditionally believe in the real existence of Satan, demons, possession, and of course religious experiences with God. The people one might assume would be most likely to take these claims seriously and at least try to investigate their possible truth are also those who seem quickest to condemn the murderers and call for their execution.

The simple fact of the matter is, our legal system can’t differentiate between allegedly valid religious experiences and the hallucinations or voices of an insane person. We have no way of legally establishing that Andrea Yates is a true religious mystic rather than a mentally ill woman. If Abraham appeared today, we would have no way of establishing that he is a true prophet of God and father of Faith rather than a mentally deluded man who tried to kill his son.

All our justice system can do is establish that the person in question did commit or try to commit harm and does claim to have been acting upon some “higher moral standard” based upon audio and/or visual communications from some other plane of existence. Because such communications are not the normal experience of most people and, among those who do claim such communications, most do not say that they are told to harm others, the accused person must be found insane — even if it is possible that they are telling the truth and know better than the rest of us.

At the same time, American Christians also don’t seem capable of differentiating between valid religious experiences and the hallucinations of an insane person. Mental illness is biochemical in origin, not religious — but that doesn't mean that religion is innocent or plays no role. Religion can mask the symptoms of mental illness until it is too late. Religion can also encourage latent problems, making a bad situation even worse.

In the case of Deanna Laney, a mother who killed her children with a rock, her congregation in the East Texas town of Tyler had no clue that she was psychotic. She even told people that God had informed her of the coming end of the world and that she had to get her house in order. Their reaction was that she was blessed and touched by God because in her evangelical culture, this is normal. For everyone else, this is a sign of mental illness.

What does this mean? It means that, for most cases, we have a reasonably firm standard for judging whether or not a person is “mentally ill” such that they shouldn’t be held legally responsible for their actions. Unfortunately, it also means that this standard is, in part, based upon which religious experiences are “popular” and accepted by most people. It is subjective, it is dependent upon the most popular religious opinions in the country, and — for better or for worse — there really isn’t anything we can do about that.

« A Solution to the Insanity Plea? | Capital Punishment »