Good..someone should be very happy..
Posted on 06/29/2006 10:51:08 AM PDT by blitzgig
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Arizona's law on the insanity defense is not too restrictive in limiting evidence defendants can present at trial. By a 6-3 vote, justices affirmed the murder conviction of Eric Clark, who thought he was being pursued by space aliens when he killed an Arizona police officer. Clark, a paranoid schizophrenic who was a teenager at the time, is serving 25 years to life in prison.
Under Arizona's law, defendants "may be found guilty except insane'' if they prove they were so mentally ill that they did not know what they did was wrong. Many other states also allow insanity findings for defendants who can show they did not understand the nature of their criminal acts.
Critics had said that Arizona's standard for proving insanity is almost impossible to meet, violating the constitutional rights of mentally ill defendants.
Writing for the majority, Justice David Souter disagreed.
"Arizona's rule serves to preserve the state's chosen standard for recognizing insanity as a defense and to avoid confusion and misunderstanding on the part of jurors,'' he wrote.
Souter said the state can limit psychiatric testimony to avoid such confusion, given the often dueling opinions of experts and inability of anyone to truly know what is in someone else's mind.
But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said in a dissent that restricting expert testimony deprived jurors of evidence they needed to "make sense'' of Clark's claims of mental illness.
"In sum, the rule forces the jury to decide guilt in a fictional world with undefined and unexplained behaviors,'' Kennedy wrote on behalf of himself and justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
(ironic, considering the subject matter isn't it? LOL!)
Let me take a guess at the three dissenters:
Stevens, Ginsberg, and Breyer?
Actually, it was Stevens, Ginsburg, and Kennedy.
Amazingly, Breyer and Souter showed good sense for a change and voted with the conservatives.
Geez, I was off! Stevens, Ginsburg and...KENNEDY???
There once was a time when I would have been totally surprised, but the way Kennedy has been ruling lately...
Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago; but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock with it, it is become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging its sudden possessors until evil-doers should conclude that the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very calibre of the people the lawyers most frequently try to save by the insanity subterfuge ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think.
MARK TWAIN
Good..someone should be very happy..
They don't need to make sense of his mental illness. This is not a professional psychiatric panel. They only need to hear the part applicable to the law. They are average citizens who can apply common sense to that specific issue. More than they need could serve to confuse them and draw an emotional response.
thought he was being pursued by space aliens ..
--
Actually, it was Stevens, Ginsburg, and Kennedy.
A plausible theory.. lol. 8-)
Very good. Being a minor and/or mentally ill should not exempt someone from execution, though I think it is preferable to have these animals rot in a prison for the rest of their lives.
Actually, given Kennedy's ruling, we're lucky it wasn't a 5-4 decision for the bad guys. I'm glad Breyer and Souter bucked this time.
On an off-topic note, when was this pic taken and at what occassion?
probably caused by the insanity peppers. The merciless pepper of Quetzlzacatenango, grown deep in the jungle primeval by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum;
I don't know..I got it off a yahoo image search under "mad mccain"..
And pray tell, what right does the Supreme Court have to be stickin' their hands in OUR cookie jar? Seems to me that SCOTUS is askin' fer truble...
This just opens the door to space alien manipulation -- this is just the beginning.
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