United States v. Jones

We'll hear arguments first this morning in Jones against the United States.

Hey everyone, this is Leon from Prologue Projects.

On this episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are talking about United States v.

Jones.

In this case, a man was arrested for petty larceny and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

The prosecution did not challenge his plea.

and so he was automatically committed to a mental institution.

Had Petitioner pled guilty to that offense or been convicted of it after trial, he could have received a maximum sentence of one year in jail.

He would now long since have been a free man.

In the end, the man spent more time in confinement than he would have spent in jail had he simply pled guilty.

When he appealed, the Supreme Court held that being found guilty by reason of insanity is proof enough that someone is dangerous and can be committed indefinitely.

This is 5 to 4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

Welcome to Five to Four, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have drained our nation like trying to buy a house has drained me.

I'm Peter.

I'm here with Michael.

Hey, everybody.

And Rhiannon.

Hi.

Just wait till you have to try to sell a house.

That is the fucking pits, my friend.

I don't care about this being draining.

Move on.

Look, I've leaned into the metaphor being just whatever is making me personally miserable every single week.

I'm no longer doing big picture metaphors.

This is now just an update.

Peter's life.

It's a Peter update.

An update on what's going on with Peter.

I'm like five days into house hunting, and let me tell you, I don't like it at all.

It's not fun and it's scary and I don't know what's happening.

And when I look up house hunting for beginners, it's basically the most overwhelming stuff I've ever consumed in my life.

I don't think our country should operate this way.

All right.

And I know you guys all own houses, but it's different for you because you both inherited yours from your wealthy families.

Yeah, that's what happens.

All right.

Quick content warning before we move on here.

We are going to be talking about mental health issues, mental health crises.

There's also super archaic language like insane and insanity being used by the court that we're going to be referencing and using throughout.

So, just a little heads up there.

This week's case, Jones v.

United States, this is a case from 1983 about something we've never talked about before, the insanity defense.

I'm going to present you all with a hypothetical situation that should resonate with our listener base.

Okay.

Okay.

You are being accused of murder, and in fact, you did commit it.

Okay.

But

you have a defense.

When you committed the murder, you were not of sound mind.

You were listening to dozens of hours of a podcast about the Supreme Court every single week.

Yes, yes.

Maybe you were trying to buy a house.

Just really

losing it.

Yeah.

And so what do you do?

You plead insanity, so to speak.

You argue that you were not culpable for your actions due to your mental state.

And the court agrees.

They're like, no one could listen to that much of a Supreme Court podcast.

And so you win.

You are not guilty of the murder, except you don't really win because in your state, anyone who wins using an insanity defense gets automatically thrown into a mental health facility.

You end up being committed.

for longer than you would have been in prison had you been found guilty.

So this case poses the question,

constitutional?

And the Supreme Court, in a five to four decision, says yes, of course.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So we're going to talk about this case.

We're going to talk about the insanity defense itself, one of like the weirdest little bits.

of criminal law in our system.

Yeah.

And talk about how this all sort of intersects with discussions of mental health and crime in the carceral system.

Yeah, we should talk, first of all, maybe just about a distinction.

It might seem like a quite specific or like, you know, you're really trying to thread the needle with this distinction, but it is important legally speaking.

When we're talking about being committed legally for a mental illness, there are two different kinds of commitment.

There's criminal commitment and civil commitment.

You can be civilly committed or criminally committed.

Using the insanity defense and getting committed to a mental health facility in a criminal case is a criminal commitment, right?

But other kinds of commitment on the basis of your mental illness or the symptoms that you're experiencing as a result of mental illness.

Most people are actually more familiar with civil commitment.

So this would be, for example, the kinds of involuntary commitments that are allowed by law when somebody is experiencing acute mental struggle, right?

Some state might allow for that involuntary commitment to be for, you know, up to 24 or 48 or 72 hours.

Those are civil commitments.

And civil commitments can be extended, right, under the law.

But we just want to make a distinction here that with the insanity defense, you are talking about a criminal case.

These are criminal commitments.

And what the court is doing here is making different kinds of rules based on whether you're civilly committed or criminally committed, making different kinds of rules in the Constitution based on that distinction, right?

So turning to the facts of the case, this one actually is not about a murder, something much less serious than a murder.

This is September 1975, and Michael Jones was arrested for petty larceny in DC for attempting to steal a jacket.

Petty larceny, this is misdemeanor theft.

Again, attempted to steal a jacket.

This is not a serious, definitely not a violent crime.

That charge carried a maximum possible prison sentence of up to one year in D.C.

DC at that time.

So, in court, there was at least some indication that Mr.

Jones had some serious mental illness because the judge ordered that he undergo a competency evaluation.

So, competency is different than the insanity defense.

Competency is a test to make sure that you're fit to stand trial, which Mr.

Jones was.

But then, once you move on in the criminal case, you can still plead insanity, even if you are competent.

At the competency evaluation, a psychologist diagnosed Mr.

Jones with paranoid-type schizophrenia, but he did say that he was fit to stand trial.

Now we get into the details of this defense of insanity.

So insanity is a defense you can bring up before trial.

In most places in the United States, it's a kind of plea that you make.

You plead insanity.

Insanity does not mean I have a mental illness, so I'm not guilty.

And importantly, it does not mean I'm so mentally ill that I don't understand what's happening right now in my criminal case, right?

That, again, refers back to legal competency.

That's something else.

Insanity means that at the time of the crime, the accused person was so mentally disturbed or mentally incapacitated that they did not have the required mental state that required intention to commit the crime.

So therefore, they're not guilty, right?

It doesn't mean, oh, I was diagnosed with schizophrenia, so I'm not guilty, right?

It's actually what the specific mental state was at the time that the offense was committed.

The insanity defense means you essentially essentially admit that you did the crime, but you're denying responsibility for it because you lacked the capacity to act intentionally.

This is important to keep in mind.

It's important to keep in mind that the insanity defense does not mean you are saying someone is permanently insane, right?

And can never be held responsible for their actions.

It is that temporary state referencing only the time that the offense was committed.

So, Mr.

Jones does this.

He enters a plea of insanity.

He's saying, yes, I attempted to steal a jacket.

Yes, I did do that.

But when I did it, I was experiencing such acute mental illness that I was not acting with the intent that a mentally capacious person would act with, right?

And that's what's required by law to be found guilty.

So I can't be held legally responsible.

I cannot be found guilty.

So we'll talk in a minute about the law that is in play in DC at this time.

But what happens is that Mr.

Jones enters his plea of insanity.

The prosecutor does not oppose it.

It's not thought about in court.

So the plea is accepted and it's entered.

And according to the law at the time, Mr.

Jones was automatically committed to a mental health institution.

So.

After 50 days of commitment following NGRI, not guilty by reason of insanity, the law in D.C.

at the time required that there be a hearing to determine basically if Mr.

Jones is still too mentally ill to be released, right?

At that hearing, it's the defendant, so Mr.

Jones, who has the burden of showing that he is no longer mentally ill or dangerous if he wants to get out of the mental health facility.

A psychologist at the facility where Mr.

Jones was committed testified that Mr.

Jones's illness was still quite active and that he posed a danger to himself and to others at that 50-day mark.

So the court ruled that Mr.

Jones would remain committed in that facility.

Now, the law allowed for new hearings every six months after that, if somebody wanted to contest their commitment.

But because of like some procedural confusion at the time, Mr.

Jones got a new attorney.

He actually didn't get another hearing until early 1976, which was about a year after he had originally been committed.

Now, remember, the maximum punishment for petty larceny, the crime that Mr.

Jones was charged with, had he been found guilty of it, it would have been a year in prison.

So at this point, Mr.

Jones' argument was that his commitment was extending beyond what he maximally could have been sentenced to, right?

And so he should then be released.

In the alternative, he was saying, maybe I could be recommitted if the government wants me to be recommitted, but that should only happen according to civil commitment standards, right?

Where the burden is on the state.

I could have a trial where a jury would decide, right?

Evidence would be presented.

The court denied all of that.

The court said, it doesn't matter that you have been committed for longer than what could be the maximum sentence.

We're not going to give you civil commitment protections.

This is criminal commitment.

Denied all of those requests.

And so Mr.

Jones appealed, and it makes its way all of the way to the Supreme Court.

All right.

So let's talk about the opinion here.

Big picture, you have this DC law that basically says, you know, if you are acquitted because you pled insanity, then you are automatically automatically committed to a mental health facility, right?

So there are essentially two issues here.

First, is it okay to automatically, without any hearing or process, commit someone who successfully relies on the insanity defense?

And then second, if so, can you commit someone for longer than their prison term would have been had they actually just been convicted of the crime?

So Justice Lewis Powell writes the majority here.

First, he talks about the idea of of automatic commitment.

So again, when someone in DC successfully pleads insanity, they are automatically committed to a mental health institution.

So this is a due process concern, right?

Because there's no hearing or anything.

It's like, well, is this really, is this really okay?

There are various constitutional provisions that seem to be relevant here.

Yeah.

When he pleads insanity, the defendant in this case is saying he was not mentally culpable at the time of the crime, right?

That's different than a court finding that he is mentally ill at the time of the court case, let alone that he is too dangerous to exist freely in society, right?

Right.

So it's like, you know, it's some pretty obvious constitutional concerns, do process concerns here.

Absolutely.

Just for illustrative purposes for this, like

one

flavor of sort of insanity defense you might be familiar with is like the battered spouse syndrome, which is when somebody is a victim of domestic violence and then they sort of break and kill their abuser.

That is someone saying, I was not in a mental state to make like a sound judgment at the time, but they are also no longer in a relationship with their abuser and therefore no longer in the future dangerous.

Right.

I mean, it could also be, you know, a substantial period of time after

the commission of the crime.

Yeah.

So Powell says a couple of things about this.

First, he says, look, Congress found that this was an adequate reason for involuntarily committing someone.

Again, this is D.C., so Congress, federal Congress is passing the law.

Right.

Which, like,

right.

You know, Congress passed the law and you are being asked to determine whether it is constitutional.

Right.

Yes.

That is simply how laws work, right?

That is what the court does.

Right.

It seems weird to say, like, well, Congress thought it was okay.

Like, that's a good argument.

Like, right.

Right.

Laws are passed by the legislature

and then they are reviewed by the judiciary, which is you, by the way.

We reviewed the record, and it seemed like the people who passed this bill thought it was a bad idea and not constitutional.

Right.

What the fuck?

That's not going to happen, bro.

Like, yeah, the people that passed the law liked it.

That is sure.

Okay.

So he cites the findings from a committee on this topic, but the findings are just like the committee being like, well, we think it's okay to forcibly hospitalize these people.

It's not like they were citing research or something or citing experts, right?

It was just sort of the committee giving its own personal opinion of whether this is okay.

Yeah, some of the language they quote also, I think, is indicative of

how seriously Congress took this.

Like they call it a statutory scheme for commitment of insane criminals.

Insane criminals.

That's not a phrase I think you will find in the congressional record in the modern era, because we understand you don't just categorize people that way.

Right.

Right.

But they're like, oh, these people are nuts and dangerous.

Yeah.

Let's just put them in a hospital.

And for the record, this law was passed in 1970.

So what we're running with here is a bunch of congresspeople from 1970 speculating about mental health.

That's what we're working with in this situation.

So Powell follows up by saying, quote, it comports with common sense to conclude that someone whose mental illness was sufficient to lead him to commit a criminal act is likely to remain ill and in need of treatment.

Which, like, I didn't know you could do this.

You know, I didn't know that instead of giving an actual argument as a Supreme Court justice, you could just say it's common sense and leave it at that.

It's so lazy.

It feels sort of rude when there are four dissenters

to be like, well, it's common sense.

I shouldn't even have to explain.

I'm not going to explain it.

Yeah.

It's like a bare majority agrees with you, man.

It's not everybody.

It's not common sense.

And like,

it's just not really a common sense issue whether someone remains mentally ill over the span of several years.

Like, how are you deducing that with common sense?

How are you going to common sense yourself into a psychiatry degree right now?

I almost want to say that there's junk science, but that's not really it.

It's like the assumption of junk science, right?

Yes.

Like the most obvious issue here is that the court seems to treat like insane and not insane as like a binary thing.

Some people are crazy and some people aren't.

You know, obviously, not reckoning with the spectrum of mental health here.

So the idea that someone might experience schizophrenia at one point and then shortly after be a totally functional person doesn't really comport with Powell's conception of what it means to be crazy or whatever.

Right, totally.

Or that somebody could have schizophrenia for their whole life, but be experiencing it at different times in different ways, right?

Right.

Or to have any kind of mental illness and then to receive treatment and for the treatment to work and for you know a person to be completely changed yeah when i was reading up about this case i saw a law professor back in the mid 80s describe powell's arguments here as the use of folk wisdom

like just saying it's common sense and oh everybody knows this right like we just hand down

these assumptions about people over years and that's what my daddy taught me about people with paranoid-type schizophrenia.

So, right?

Like, it's just not actually legal argument, it's not legal analysis, and maybe more importantly, it's not informed by medical science, even at the time this decision came down, right?

You see this a lot in the criminal legal system with regards to like any time mental illness comes up.

But one example that really persists in a dangerous way today, till this day, is in death penalty cases.

You know, in Texas, for example, when a jury is deciding whether or not to give somebody the death penalty, one of the factors that the jurors have to take into account is the defendant's potential for future dangerousness.

Future dangerousness, psychiatrists will tell you all day long, is largely not predictable.

Yeah.

Right.

That's not grounded in medical science.

When you're getting testimony about somebody's supposed potential for future dangerousness, that is largely junk, right?

You can't assess it.

You can't predict it.

And the recidivism rates for people who have mental illness, like bear this out.

There's not really a connection with people who commit crimes when they, you know, don't have full mental capacity.

And that correlates to them committing crimes in the future.

That it's not there.

The data is not there and the science isn't there.

You still see it persisting across the criminal punishment system for sure.

And you see it in this case with Powell making an entire majority opinion out of, well, this is just common sense.

Right.

Insane guy.

He's just insane.

Right.

Yeah.

So next, Powell gets to the question of whether it's constitutional that someone in this situation be involuntarily committed for longer than the potential sentence for his crime.

But Powell basically just says, no, this operates like normal civil commitment.

And normal civil commitment, it's indefinite.

You are committed until you prove that you are not a danger danger to yourself or others.

So, first of all, he's sort of just conflating what this is, a specific type of commitment for insanity acquittees, and civil commitment.

But maybe more importantly, he's not really reckoning with this argument.

What's interesting about this argument is that it's sort of prodding at the absurdity of some of our involuntary commitment laws.

Like, it doesn't really make sense that we have finite sentences for people who commit actual crimes, but indefinite detention for people who we deem dangerous in some general way.

Right.

Right.

But rather than reckon with that tension, Powell's just sort of like, well, that's how it is.

Right.

And then he moves on.

Yeah.

That's it.

Like, very weird sort of opinion in that way, in the sense that he's just very consistently being just describing what the literal laws on the books are.

When the question should be, are those laws constitutional?

Do they make sense?

Do they comport with due process?

He really never gets to those questions.

It's bizarre.

No, it's a really sloppy opinion.

So there are two dissents, and Brennan's is the principal dissent, and it's quite good at sort of dissecting the sloppiness of this opinion and taking seriously the difference between finite commitment and indefinite commitment, taking seriously the difference between criminal commitment and civil commitment, and trying to consider all the interests involved and coming out with some sort of appropriate balance, right?

Right.

So he says,

you know, the petitioner sort of concedes, and we think it's right that if you plead insanity and are not guilty by reason of insanity, that some finite period of commitment might be appropriate or could be appropriate or could be constitutional, let's say, if Congress deems it appropriate.

But indefinite commitment is a serious burden on liberty and one that requires a higher showing, right?

Like there should be a larger burden on the government than what is required of them here.

And

I mean, I don't know what to say other than like, yeah, obviously.

Yeah, that's correct.

This is common sense.

You're going to put someone in a hospital for the rest of their lives.

Like that's that is a serious, serious imposition on their liberty.

i think he's very strong on talking about you know how much of an imposition on their liberty it is he talks about like you know when you're committed much like being incarcerated you can't leave you can't see family and friends your hours are dictated to you your autonomy is stripped of you but unlike incarceration, you oftentimes can no longer decline medical treatment.

And so you might get medicated against your will.

And psychotropic drugs often have serious side effects that last even after you stop taking them.

And he's very good at that point.

I also think he, you know, he doesn't dwell on it, but he makes, I think, a correct point that, you know, the majority sort of collapses the distinction between Peter's opening.

hypothetical and the reality here, right?

He says, there's room for doubt whether a single attempt to shoplift and a string of brutal murders are equally accurate and equally permanent predictors of dangerousness.

Right.

Which we didn't even really touch on the fact that this guy just stole a fucking jacket.

Right.

This is the idea that this guy, that someone who steals jackets, even like compulsively, needs to be like kept off the street or something.

Right.

Or is deemed dangerous.

Right.

Right.

That's wild.

That's so wild.

Right.

It just doesn't really feel like what the like commitment process is meant to deal with, right?

Right.

But the thing is, the like outer boundaries of these processes in both this context and like the civil commitment process are just super hazy.

Absolutely.

Right.

And so you get to be like, well, and this is where that binary comes in, where the court gets to be like, well, he's crazy.

So like however it manifests is irrelevant, right?

The important point is that he's just crazy.

Look, he's schizophrenic and it made him steal a jacket.

So who are we to say that his schizophrenia might not make him stab someone next time?

Right.

You know?

Right.

That's basically the majority opinions reasoning here.

Yeah.

Which is, we should just say, like incredibly ableist, right?

Oh, absolutely.

Cannot make those determinations based on somebody's past behavior, based on a medical diagnosis that in the future they are going to be violent.

Yeah.

Just a minority report for dipshits here.

Right.

Exactly.

I think it is time for a quick break.

All right.

We are back.

There is another dissent.

Justice Stevens writes a dissent.

It is one paragraph long.

He's just making a procedural point or maybe just emphasizing where he stands procedurally on this.

Justice Stevens is dissenting because,

in his opinion, a defendant would be presumptively entitled to their freedom to release from commitment after being in commitment.

for the maximum amount of time that they would have been criminally punished in the criminal case had they been found guilty, right?

So for Mr.

Jones, Justice Stevens is saying Mr.

Jones was presumptively entitled to his freedom to being released from the mental health facility after a period of one year.

Like that's kind of the maximum, right?

And that presumption is important that the state could argue that Mr.

Jones needs to stay in for longer than that, but then the burden would be on the state.

The state needs to bring some evidence.

The state needs to bring some testimony.

The state needs to bring that case, right?

But it would be legally presumed that once you've reached the maximum term that you would have been punished had you been found guilty in the criminal case, that's when the commitment, the criminal commitment for insanity, quote unquote, should presumptively end.

Right.

Yeah, it's interesting.

The majority is doing something where they're saying, look,

this isn't penal.

We're not committing you as a penal measure.

It's for rehabilitative purposes because you are mentally ill.

And the principal dissent, they maybe cast a little side eye at that, but for the most part, take it in good faith and argue in good faith around that premise.

And I think the way to read Steven's dissent is him just sort of being like, who the fuck are we kidding?

Yeah.

Like, this guy stole a jacket and we're not imprisoning him because he was insane.

We are imprisoning him in a hospital instead.

And so it should be for the same length.

In a lot of ways, it's like the most honest opinion

of the three in that sense, I think, because it is getting at what's really going on here in the majority at the very least, which is they're like, well, this is a bad guy and he should be punished.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

It's quite practical.

A few sentences, very practical.

One thing I want to mention before we go on is like, we've sort of danced around this a bit too, but like, obviously, there's no real such thing as insanity, right?

It's just this like hyper-antiquated way to refer to like a spectrum of mental health issues, which is not to say that there aren't like discrete mental health conditions, schizophrenia is one of them, but like like it's a little bit surreal to be operating under a framework that feels like 150 years old.

You know what I mean?

Right, right, exactly.

It's a very, very antiquated approach to mental illness, understanding of mental illness.

And it is a very old word, insanity, that the law just like holds on to, right?

Right.

It's just like you're being convicted for a case of the crazies.

And like, we're just talking about this in a court in the 1980s.

What the fuck's going on?

Yeah.

The dissent dissent at one point

cites a case from like 1895.

And it's just like the state of like mental health care in the 1890s was like, oh, a woman is in the throes of hysteria.

Let's give her some heroin.

You know, like, right.

Like, what are we talking about?

But there were bad things about it too, though.

No, but like, turning to the history of NGRI, not guilty by reason of insanity, this defense, the first time it ever comes up is in England in the 1840s.

This was called the McNaughton rule, based on this guy, McNaughton, who went to trial, but was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

He murdered somebody.

He murdered the wrong guy.

He murdered somebody he thought was like the prime minister of England, but it was just like a guy on the street.

Yeah.

One of the worst mistakes you can make.

So McNaughton was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

And the House of Lords, again, this is like 1843 in England, they fashioned a rule.

They said to establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason from disease of the mind as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong.

So in general, this kind of weird rule that we're talking about, it's born out of this 1840s understanding of mental illness, right?

That sometimes somebody could be so mentally ill that they basically don't understand the difference between right and wrong, right?

Or they don't understand what they are doing in the moment, and therefore they can't be found legally responsible.

So, basically, throughout history, since the 1840s with the McNaughton rule and then bringing over the English common law to the United States in the U.S.

for most of our history, the insanity defense was basically the McNaughton rule, right?

Like, does somebody understand the difference between right and wrong when they committed a crime?

Did they understand what they were doing when they committed a crime?

That was...

basically the rule through the 60s, 70s, into the early 80s.

The model penal code in 1981, the the definition of insanity was a lack of substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality of their conduct or to conform their conduct to the requirements of the law.

You see that basically this is the McNaughton rule, right?

But something wacky happened in 1981,

which is that John Hinckley tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan.

The alt indie musician, John Hinkley, singer-songwriter.

Singer-songwriter.

All of insanity defense history is bookended by attempts on the life of a

president or prime minister, right?

Right.

It all circles back.

That's right.

Yeah, basically.

And John Hinckley in the early 1980s, of course, was tried, but was found not guilty by reason of insanity for that assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.

The public went fucking apeshit.

They did not like that, that that he, you know, quote unquote got off, even though he was criminally committed to a mental health facility.

Also, remember, this doesn't sound real, but wasn't his reason that he was trying to impress Jody Foster?

Yes.

That's right.

Right.

So, like.

Yeah.

Who are we kidding here?

Come on.

If the insanity defense is worth a goddamn thing, surely when you try to shoot the president to impress Jody Foster, you got to be able to play the card at that point, right?

Right.

Right.

You would think so.

But people really, really didn't like it.

They did not like that Hinkley had quote unquote gotten off by using the defense of insanity.

I looked back and found some quotes from people, members of the public who had been interviewed about their reaction to the Hinckley verdict.

In the Washington Post, an individual in D.C.

said, you know, it didn't take them long to catch John Wilkes Booth and take care of him.

We as a society have gone wrong since then.

We as a nation have made Hinkley famous.

We spent millions on his trial and he beat us, end quote.

Another person said, justice is funny.

It looks like now you can just do anything you want and then just play crazy.

The attorney general, William French Smith, said, quote, there must be an end to the doctrine that allows so many persons to commit crimes of violence, to use confusing procedures to their own advantage, and then to have the door opened for them to return to the society which they victimized.

Very, very intense language.

Obviously, people are under the impression that, you know, Hinkley, other people who use this insanity defense are like getting off scot free or just like release, right?

And not understanding at all the punishment, sometimes very intense punishment that comes from having used the insanity defense.

A Cornell University survey after the Hinkley verdict found that 87%

of the people surveyed believed that the insanity defense was a loophole that allowed people to go free.

So, after the Hinkley verdict, it's clear that the public really doesn't understand how the insanity defense works.

At least they don't understand what it means that somebody, quote unquote, is not guilty by reason of insanity, what that actually realistically means for what happens to the person in terms of commitment to a mental health facility, punishment, that kind of thing.

Across the country, after the Hinkley verdict, states decided to either abolish the insanity defense altogether, or in general, make it much harder to use the insanity defense.

They would change the statutory definitions of insanity and how somebody could plead insanity at trial that made it much more difficult to find somebody, quote unquote, legally insane at the time that they committed an offense.

So, even though before all of this, before Hinkley, throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s, at the time that Mr.

Jones in this Supreme Court case came to the Supreme Court, the insanity defense was really, really rarely used.

It was used in less than 2% of felony cases.

It was not successful very often.

It's a very hard defense to actually succeed on.

So I think really what this shows is that courts...

don't like insanity as a defense.

The court doesn't want to contend with any sort of complicated medical realities, the medical science.

They also don't want to contend with the procedures that are operating here in this historical context, in which just a couple of years ago, the public, the government, everybody was really mad at the idea that somebody was getting off easy, no matter that the reality was that Hinkley was committed to a mental health facility and stayed there for decades.

The court doesn't want to deal with what any of this really means.

They They just want to punish somebody.

Right.

There's another bit of sort of parallel, not quite related history here, which is just about the sort of course of involuntary commitment in the U.S.

It used to be that just about anyone experiencing some sort of mental health issue could be committed against their will.

And the way that this played out was that people would literally be committed for public drunkenness or addiction.

There were some outlier cases where people in situations like that were kept committed for the rest of their lives.

And then, in like the mid-century, 40s, 50s, 60s, a few things happen.

First, you get the development of antipsychotic drugs, which provide an alternative to institutionalization.

Then, you get like some exposés about the conditions in some mental health facilities, which were fucking disgusting.

And then, you also get the civil rights movement and its attendant movements, which sort of change how we think about individual liberty.

And so, the system changes.

And after that, you can only commit someone who is a danger to themselves or others.

And theoretically, that was supposed to be accompanied by public investment in mental health treatment and care.

But of course, that never really comes.

And so here we are.

Yeah.

So that's sort of happening in the background.

That's sort of the shift in the country's approach to mental health care when you have instances of sort of like discrete psychosis, et cetera.

Yeah.

and I do think it's worth discussing involuntary commitment a little bit, what it's like, even today, after, like Peter said, a lot of reforms aimed at improving it.

You know, these days, it's not always clear whether involuntary commitment is actually beneficial.

Sometimes it's not.

And in fact, can be traumatizing, can lead to loss of trust, can lead to people suggesting that they're going to be less open about their struggles and less likely to seek help in the future.

It's something that should be rare.

It's something that should be extremely rare and

only done with a lot of care.

And

I had some quotes from one of these studies about the effectiveness of involuntary commitment.

Investigating the impact of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization on youth and young adult trust and help seeking and pathways to care by Nev Jones and others.

It was like a prison.

You wake up at this time.

They come in to wake you up.

If you want to shower, they have to be there monitoring.

It wasn't like we were talking to them.

It was like they were just standing guard and just very cold.

After lunch, maybe they'd take us outside to this little enclosure that was all fenced in, felt like animals on display there.

They didn't see us as people.

One of the patients said, hey, you need to stop crying.

And I was like, why?

I don't care.

Why?

And another was like, well, they won't let you out unless you show emotional stability.

And I was like, like, oh, my God.

Okay.

So you have adaptive behaviors to end this of hiding emotional states, feelings of dehumanization, being stripped of autonomy.

And that has totally separate and apart from often being medicated against their will with drugs that will lead to long-term side effects that could include kidney damage, liver damage, involuntary muscle spasms that continue on for the rest of your life, even if you stop taking the medication.

Literally reorganize the way your brain works.

Yeah.

Changes the way you think, the way you experience the world.

Yeah.

Yeah.

To say nothing of just like, it doesn't make me feel good.

I don't like how I feel when I'm on this medicine.

Yeah.

You know, I'm somebody who is a believer in medication for mental illness, as someone who's struggled with bipolar my entire life and has been on a whole range and suite suite of medications.

But the idea that it's just being forced on you and like Brennan mentions in dissent, this is also very ripe for abuse, where medication very easily could be for the institution's benefit rather than the patients for sedation purposes to make people more compliant and easier to deal with rather than for their benefit, right?

So

it's something that should be taken very seriously.

Right.

And compared to the language and attitude of the majority opinion, it's clear that it's not.

It's clear that it's not.

Yeah, I think what you're getting at, Michael, is that this is punitive.

Yes.

For as much as the court wants to say that this is about rehabilitation.

So if somebody is found so mentally ill to be in need of this kind of commitment, it's because they need care.

It's because they need rehabilitation.

It's because they need treatment.

But actually the reality of this is that it's punitive.

This is punishment for the crime.

And the way the court treats this case proves that, right?

In saying, like, it doesn't even matter.

This is involuntary commitment.

It is for an indefinite period of time.

It can extend beyond the maximum sentence you would have received had you been found guilty of the crime.

That, to me, makes it in and of itself on its face punitive, right?

This is punishing people in another way.

You can say you're not sending them to prison, but you are.

And sorry, just to interject here, I want to also be clear, not just punishing people for the crime, but also for invoking the insanity defense, right?

It is a method for attempting to cut this defense off.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

And I think all of that like brings me back to why it is that in the law, there is an insanity defense, right?

The whole point, as we've set up.

throughout the episode, as I talked about in the beginning, the whole point is that there are times when people are under such intense mental duress or experiencing such acute, serious symptoms of mental illness, whether that's temporary or longer term.

But in the moment, they commit a crime and legally as a society, we say, you know what, you have this defense because legally as a society, we cannot hold you responsible for that.

You were not in your right mind.

Mental illness or what have you was operating in such a way inside your body, on your brain, that we are not going to hold you responsible.

That's really important because, in the criminal law, in any sort of theory of a just system, you are holding people responsible, finding people guilty because they intentionally committed wrongs for whatever harm they caused, for whatever sort of, you know, ill or crime against society that they committed, it's because they intended to do so.

And so, we hold them responsible because they did something on purpose to hurt somebody, whatever it may be.

So that's why you have the insanity defense.

It's supposed to be, you know, like in this pressure cooker, that there's this pressure valve to relieve all of the states violence that can fall onto somebody for committing a crime.

It's supposed to be that you have this outlet because you cannot legally be found responsible for something that you did when you had severely diminished capacity for understanding what you were doing, right?

And so that idea, the whole reason why you have an insanity defense, the whole reason why NGRI exists is so that the system is not overly inclusive in terms of punishment, so that it's not overly punitive to people who are actually not responsible for what happens.

And here you have in this case, and in lots of cases that are about mental illness in the criminal legal system, including tons of death penalty jurisprudence at the Supreme Court.

But you have in this case, which says essentially that indefinite, involuntary commitment for being found insane, for using NGRI, for using the insanity defense, that that's okay.

You see that the whole system is just so attuned, so turned towards punishment as the automatic response that they never even consider.

There is not even a consideration anywhere in the majority opinion of why NGRI exists in the law.

This case is a very good reminder of how consistently but how awkwardly mental health care and incarceration intersect in this country and how often the debates about mental health care very sloppily overlap with debates about incarceration.

It really lays bare a lot of the lies that we as a society tell ourselves about mental health care and about prisons.

Like on one hand, you have lawmakers and courts essentially treating commitment in mental health facilities and prison sentences as if they are interchangeable here.

And then on the other, you have this really weird element of American criminal law, which is that people in our system ostensibly are sentenced based on their culpability, which requires a certain state of mind.

And yet we consistently imprison people who we know have mental health issues.

And the response from our legal institutions has essentially been to ignore that problem rather than to try to confront it.

And that maybe bleeds over from our culture where people talk about mentally ill people in public spaces like they are a problem for cops to address rather than something that is like miles downstream of a dozen different policy failures.

So we are perpetually facing this hammer and nail problem because the only tool in our arsenal that actually receives any funding and public support support is the carceral system.

And the way that's like manifesting right now is you have discussions about like, you know, visibly, mentally ill people in New York and San Francisco, for example, who make other people uncomfortable, basically.

And maybe they're dangerous and maybe they're not.

We don't really know, but people want action taken.

And it's very unsatisfying to the average person to say, well, the action that needs to be taken is like holistic.

We need to prevent this shit from happening.

These are policy failures.

Right.

That the action that needed to be taken needed to be taken 20 years ago when they needed real interventions when they were in school, when they were kids, they needed access to health care, right?

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Or shit, last week, could you have put them in a house?

Yeah.

Right.

Right.

Like, does this person have a place to sleep?

Like, it can be pretty simple policy-wise as well.

And this has created a space for right-wing freaks who, like, if you read their policy papers and shit on this stuff, what they want is to make it easier to commit people involuntarily again, to sort of lower the bar a little bit so that basically homeless people experiencing mental illness can just be tossed into facilities against their will.

That's sort of detached from the insanity defense question, of course, but it is all part of the same sort of tapestry of how our

legal system deals with mental illness.

And that is to say that it does so very clumsily with absolutely no fucking regard to what actually works, let alone the humanity and dignity of people experiencing mental illness.

Next week, premium episode, as promised, we are going to be talking about right-wing resistance to the Supreme Court, both historically and right now.

Just a couple months ago, Texas thought it would be cool to just ignore the Supreme Court on the border.

Yeah.

And we thought that was interesting.

And we're going to talk about how that traces as part of a long history of right-wing resistance to the court.

Follow us on social media at 54Pod and subscribe to our Patreon for episodes like that.

Patreon.com slash 54pod, all spelled out.

Get those episodes.

Add free episodes, access to our Slack, all sorts of shit.

We'll see you next week.

5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects.

Rachel Ward is our producer.

Leon Nafok and Andrew Parsons provide editorial support.

And our researcher is Jonathan DeBruh.

Peter Murphy designed our website, 54pod.com.

Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at ChipsNY.

And our theme song is by Spatial Relations.