

A sign of progress?

We learned yesterday that the man responsible for killing six people and injuring many others, including a member of Congress, in a shooting rampage in Arizona in 2011 will not receive the death penalty. Jared Loughner, who is diagnosed with schizophrenia, yesterday entered a plea that will keep him imprisoned for the rest of his natural life.

In accepting the plea deal, prosecutors cited the wishes of victims and their families to avoid the re-traumatizing ordeal of a high-profile, long-running criminal trial. In contrast, in 1998 my brother Ted Kaczynski – diagnosed with schizophrenia in five separate psychiatric evaluations – faced a capital trial in which federal prosecutors pushed hard for the death penalty. A plea agreement for a life sentence was offered only after the trial started to unravel around Ted’s mental illness, and after his family refused to keep quiet about the barbarity of trying to execute a mentally ill man who’d been turned in by his family members.

What few people realize is that the overwhelming majority of criminal defendants who have serious mental illness are ruled legally sane (just as Loughner was yesterday) and thus they are equally exposed to the death penalty as would be any defendant without mental illness.

What we see in our current legal system is a huge disconnect between the modern medical understanding of mental illness and a badly outdated legal definition of insanity. As a result, more than 100 people with the most serious types of mental illness have been executed in the US since 1976, according to a 2003 study published by Amnesty  International. That disheartening number includes several psychotic defendants who acted (and often acted-out) as their own defense attorneys at trial.

Yesterday, however, sanity prevailed. Lawyers, victims and their families, and the Attorney General all quietly agreed that justice would not be served by seeking a death sentence for someone as sick as Jared Loughner.

Let us hope that, at last, we have turned a corner in appreciating that criminal defendants diagnosed with severe and persistent mental illness should be treated as a separate category; and that our commitment to protecting society and to holding offenders accountable does not mean that we have to kill people whose judgment was compromised by severe illness.

David Kaczynski