Legislator wants to eliminate 'not gulty by reason of insanity' option.
A Massachusetts state representative wants to change the state's insanity laws to eliminate the “not guilty by reason of insanity option.”
I’ve always believed that, unless you’re defending yourself or family, or in the military, that the act of killing someone is, in and of itself, is insane, so I’d just remove the whole insane option entirely. In my book, it’s no excuse.
State Rep. Lew Evangelidis, however, wants to replace it with "guilty, but insane." He’s filing the bill Wednesday.
Convicted killers would have to spend at least 10 years in a secure mental health facility, followed by annual reviews to determine whether they continue to pose a danger.
As it stands now, they can only be committed to a state hospital for six months and then re-committed every year after a new evaluation.
I just watched “Compulsion” again last night, the fictionalized account of the Leopold-Loeb case from 1924. Both 19-year-old were sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks. An impassion speech by defense attorney Clarence Darrow spared both men from the gallows.
“Insanity is a legal term, not a medical term,” one of Darrow’s witnesses said . Darrow, incidentally, had changed their pleas from “not guilty by reason of insanity” to guilty. The staunch opponent of capital punishment knew changing the plea to guilty would eliminate a jury deciding the duo’s fate and leave it up to one judge.
Loeb was stabbed to death at Joliet Prison in 1936. Leopold was paroled in 1958 and died of diabetes-related heart attack in 1971 at the age of 66.
Anyway, legal term or medical term, I’m all for eliminating it as an excuse for killing someone.
Richard's Homicide Omnibus
Follow me on Twitter!
Worth a look
Could Zodiac, the Black Dahlia killer and Chicago's 'lipstick murderer' all be the same man?
1970 mass murderer John Linley Frazier commits suicide in prison cell
Are the Jeff Davis Parish murders the work of a serial killer?
Comments