Supreme Court to Consider Insanity Plea

The Supreme Court will consider an appeal in a criminal murder case, in what may prove a significant test of individual state’s insanity plea laws.

Seventeen-year-old Eric Clark believed aliens were chasing him when he shot and killed an Arizona police officer nearly five years ago. Clark was a bright promising young man before he began to take a twist into some very bizarre behavior, believing his town and even his parents had been overcome by aliens. Experts on both sides of this criminal case have agreed that Clark suffered from paranoid schizophrenia at the time of this crime. However, his legal insanity was in question.

During his criminal trial Clark’s attorneys plead “guilty except insane,” arguing that he should be placed under psychiatric care. The Arizona jury found him guilty of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to life in prison.

Clark has appealed this sentence and the Supreme Court has agreed to consider the case.

Arizona criminal law allows defendants to plead insane, but the standard is nearly impossible to prove. David Goldberg, one of Clark’s attorneys, contends that, given this unattainable standard, this law violates the constitutional rights of mentally ill criminal defendants.

Utah, Montana, Kansas, and Idaho are the only four states who do not recognize an insanity plea during criminal proceedings. In other states, such as Arizona, criminal attorneys and other advocates claim that the insanity laws are much too strict to provide a plausible defense. The Supreme Court’s ruling may compel these states to change their laws.

Following the acquittal of John Hinckley, the man who shot President Reagan in 1981, states began to enact new restrictive statutes regarding insanity pleas. In 1993, Arizona changed its insanity plea statutes to read:
“A defendant may be found guilty except insane if at the time of the commission of the criminal act the person was afflicted with a mental disease or defect of such severity that the person did not know the criminal act was wrong.”

Sixteen states have filed briefs in support of Arizona, warning that if the Supreme Court accepts Clark’s appeal it would seriously call into question a majority of states’ insanity statutes.

Clark, on the other hand, has the support of several prominent associations including the American Psychological Association, the American Association on Mental Retardation, and the American Psychiatric Association.