Insanity Plea

On the outside Caroline Beale seemed like any other tourist visiting New York. Her and her boyfriend, Paul Faraway had checked into a cheap hotel in Manhattan. They had visited the usual sights, gone shopping. On the night of September 21, 1994, Beale left her boyfriend drinking with his brothers and retired early to their room. She told them she was tired. Once in the room, Beale went into labor. Early hours of the next day she gave birth to an eight-pound baby. After birth, she cleaned herself, put the newborn in a red plastic bag and placed her in the closet. By the time Faraway returned to their room, Beale was already asleep.

The following day, Olivia Ann's 22 inch body still wrapped in the plastic bag, tied around her mother's neck and hidden under her clothes, accompanied her parents in their final tour of New york.

Pregnant women with undiagnosed mental illnesses run a risk of puerperal psychosis, says Luisa Dillner of The Guardian. The psychosis, which affects every two out of a thousand mothers, causes existing mental illnesses to surface. As a result of this Dillner explains, the baby may become "the focus of abnormal thoughts, with women either denying they have given birth, or feeling they should kill their children." In a study cited in Dillner's article, one in 20 women with this disorder commits suicide, whereas one in 25 commits infanticide.

It is likely that Beale was sufferring from puerperal psychosis at the time she killed her daughter. Puerperal psychosis, coupled with post-partum psychosis can prove that Beale was clinically insane at the time of her act.

Upon their arrival at the airport, Beale refused to go through the X-ray machine. She said she was pregnant and that she was afraid the X-rays could hurt her baby. The security supervisor for the airpot, in disbelief, reached for Beale's stomach. When her fingers met something stiff under Beale's clothes, Beale replied, "that is my baby."

During her defense Beale's lawyers claimed that she was suffering from depression at the time of her pregnancy. According to their statements, this depression eventually developed into a psychosis, causing delusions that her baby had died in her womb. Later, at the time of birth, sufferring from post-partum psychosis, Beale killed her baby by placing her in a plastic bag. Beale pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

If Beale was tried in England, under the Infanticide Act she would be placed for treatment in a mental institution within a month. In the States, her lawyers fought for 18 months to place her in psychiatric care. Although her defense immediately produced the necessary psychiatric reports, it took the prosecution 14 moths to come up with an assessment of their own. Marjory Fisher, the Queens prosecutor of special victims was determined to keep Beale locked up for at least another year before referring her to a mental hospital for psychiatric treatment. In many interviews she granted to the press at the time, Fisher made her stand clear: "I don't want to live in a country where baby-killers are assumed to be ill."

Fisher's words echo the general feeling of hostility towards insanity as a legitimate form of defense in the United States. With the recent imprisonment of John Salvi, experts from both legal and medical professions are debating over the plea's functionality. Many believe that there needs to be change -- existing laws defining insanity are not equipped to deal with the complexity of the field that they address.

Yet many states are undertaking terminative measures, rather than a comprehensive re-modeling of the defense. Since the acquittal of john Hinckley, Jr. by reason of insanity, seven states already changed their description from not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity to guilty-but-insane. And if Governor Weld's recent proposal passes, Massachusetts may become the eight state to do so.

Thomas Gutheil, a nationally acclaimed forensic psychiatrist and a professor at Harvard Medical School, thinks such a dramatic change in a defense which forms one of the building blocks of a fair criminal justice system would be meaningless. Since the plea has "no meaning except for exoneration," says Gutheil, changing it would contraict what it stands for.

Currently, a defendant in Massachusetts can be found not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity only if at the time of the crime, the defendant, due to a mental illness or defect was not in control of his conduct or could not appreciate the wrongfullness of his actions. In other words, one can be clinically insane, but if at the time of the crime that person was in control of his/her actions regardless of his/her mental state, then the plea will not be a viable option.

Confusing but inadequate agrees Gutheil, "the only issue is whether or not the illness meets the criteria," and because of that "there is a tendency for it to be used only when defense has got nothing else." According to statistics less than one percent try it, points out Gutheil, and only a quarter of that one percent is successful. In rare cases of acquittal, the offender is sent to a mental institution for treatment, but in most cases recovery can take a life time. Especially in cases of schizophrenia, Gutheil says, "where a patient's prognosis is pretty bad, it is very hard to get them released." Full recovery is no longer relevant, the issue becomes "whether there are any clinicians or any judge that will take a chance on them."

Following Salvi's shooting down of the two abortion clinics where two young women died and five others were wounded, his lawyers argued that their defendant was a paranoid schizophrenic even before the attacks. Defense witnesses claimed that Salvi "heard voices in his head" and that he was convinced of a conspiracy against the Catholics. Prosecution witnesses gave an account of his seemingly well planned and acted out execution.

Richard Seron was the security guard on duty in one of the clinics at the time of Salvi's attack. His eye witness account of Salvi's actions read: "he was handling [his gun] like a pro. He didn't seem to me to be someone who had simply flipped out, gone to a store, bought the first thing that he saw and started shooting."

The jury ruled that Salvi was perfectly capable of controlling his actions at the time of the shootings.

Regarding mass murderers such as Salvi, Robert Simon, author of Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream says, "the common perception is that it is the ordinary guy who becomes the mass murderer, the guy who simply goes berserk one day and starts shooting." Yet most mass murderers "tend to suffer from a lethal combination of paranoia and depression," says Simon, often for longer times prior to the act. As for the act itself, "most mass murders are planned," the author concludes.

Salvi's behavior, his meticulously plotted out plan, and the final execution shows chilling similarities to another shooting spree, this time in North Carolina, by 27-year-old Wendell Williamson. Williamson's shoot out resulted in the deaths of two men and the wounding of two others. Williamson's attorneys evoked an insanity defense. Through witness testimonies about Williamson's calm and controlled manner during the shootings, how he only paused to load his rifle, prosecution contended that Williamson was well aware of what was going on. Just like Salvi, Williamson had been to the site of his shootings many times before, and had planned out a time when the street would be populated enough to cause chaos.

Paranoid schizophrenia was also used to explain Williamson's mental condition prior to, and during the shootings. According to Simon, this is a condition widely present in offenders who are "acquitted of murder by reason of insanity."

Although premediation was present both in Salvi and Williamson shootings, a tape recording of an interview with Williamson shortly after the shootings where he claimed he had telepathic powers secured him a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict. In Salvi's case his violent outbursts in the court room, throwing tables and ranting at news reporters, or the opinions of expert psychiatrists weren't sufficient evidence for the jury to grant him the plea.

"How much capacity is substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness is up to the jury" says Dr. Gutheil. Yet critics believe that in many instances the definition of an offender's state of mind may be drowned in medical terms, not clear to a group of randomly picked people, who may not have a medical background. Or given a defendant who is fleeing the scene of the crime, attempting to evade the police, or a skillful covering of his tracks may not convince the jury to accept the insanity plea.

Thus, due to nature of the plea's description, and the "grey" areas that differentiate between a criminal and a mental patient continue to threaten the use of insanity as a defense and its acceptance as a sentence especially in cases involving civilian injuries, or mortalities.

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