LegalMatch: Criminal Law

The Coffee Made Me Do It: Drugs and the Insanity Defense

There’s an interesting story in the ABA Journal today: a murder defendant is arguing that he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity. This isn’t unheard of, by any stretch of the imagination. However, his basis for the insanity defense is interesting: he claims that he spent the weeks before the murder drinking lots of coffee, and that the resulting caffeine-induced sleep deprivation drove him into murderous insanity. The story is also reported here and here.

Before continuing, I should note that I think the insanity defense gets a bad rap. It’s not the get-out-of-jail-free card that some people seem to think it is. First of all, in the U.S., the insanity defense is only even attempted in slightly less than 1% of criminal cases. And when the defense is raised, it only succeeds slightly less than a quarter of the time. This means that less than one quarter of one percent (0.25%, or 25/1000, or .025) of criminal defendants is found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Secondly, if you’re found not guilty by reason of insanity, all this means is that a jury has found that the defendant didn’t have sufficient awareness of, or control over, their actions to find the moral culpability to warrant punishment. This doesn’t mean that such a person isn’t still dangerous. As such, a person acquitted because of insanity sometimes ends up in a mental institution, where they can be held until they’re deemed to no longer be a threat to themselves or others. This might just be a few months. But it might also take many years, perhaps even longer than their prison term would have been had they been convicted. Sometimes, it never happens, and they are institutionalized for the rest of their lives. As you can see, this isn’t exactly a sweet deal for the defendant.

Third, the insanity defense actually serves a very important purpose. Criminal law is based on a few different objectives, the two main ones being deterrence and retribution. Almost everyone agrees that these two factors play a role in criminal justice, though there is a wide range of opinions on exactly how much of a role each should play (with the modern trend being a stronger focus on deterrence through rehabilitation, rather than simple punishment/retribution). In any case, because criminal law involves punishment, there must be some type of fault on the part of the defendant to warrant it. If a person is so completely out of their mind that they have no idea what they’re doing, or are completely unable to control their actions, it’s not fair to punish them. But as discussed above, they still may represent a danger to the public, and have to be dealt with accordingly.

However, when the insanity on which the defense is based was caused by the defendant’s own willful conduct (such as taking drugs), the situation becomes a little ambiguous. The defendant’s mental state may well be sufficient to make them less responsible for their actions. However, they voluntarily took a drug that they should have known might put them in such a state. As a matter of policy, it seems that a person shouldn’t be able to voluntarily put themselves in a state in which they aren’t legally responsible for their actions.

This isn’t to say that we should ban all intoxicating drugs. Rather, it’s simply an argument that, if you voluntarily take an intoxicant, you shouldn’t be relieved of any responsibility for your actions while in your intoxicated state.

I would not be surprised if this particular case, because of its unusual facts, got blown way out of proportion by the media. First of all, the success of this guy’s insanity defense depends entirely on whether a jury buys it. They very well may not. It might also be compared to the “Twinkie Defense” fiasco.

When former San Francisco supervisor Dan White shot and killed Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in 1978, he had been in a downward spiral of depression and paranoia. Once considered a fitness fanatic and advocate of healthy eating, his diet had come to consist almost entirely of junk food, including Twinkies. In his murder trial, he was found guilty of a lesser offense on the basis of diminished capacity, because of his damaged mental state at the time the crimes were committed. This became known as the “Twinkie Defense” in the media, with the assumption being that he was acquitted simply because he ate a lot of junk food. The term has come to refer to any improbable-sounding legal defense, usually derisively.

However, White’s defense attorney never made this argument, and the jury didn’t acquit him on that basis. Instead of arguing that his excessive consumption of junk food caused his insanity, they simply presented it, among many other facts, as evidence that he was insane; the exact opposite cause-and-effect relationship that the “Twinkie Defense” is said to represent.

So, what should we take away from all of this? Well, first of all, if this guy is actually acquitted (which seems unlikely) we can probably expect a few editorials and blog posts bemoaning our “broken” legal system, and wondering how this could happen. Chances are, they’ll compare it to the fictional version of the “Twinkie Defense” that everybody seems determined to believe.

However, by the time the facts of a case are distilled through the media, many important details are often lost in the shuffle. People often complain about criminal defendants “getting off” on a “technicality” even in the context of an insanity defense. This seems to be a stand in for “I didn’t like the way this case came out so it’s clearly illegitimate.” Given the actual nature and consequences of the insanity defense, anyone who fully understood it probably wouldn’t be so outraged over its use, even in bizarre cases like this.

By: Rusty Shackleford

Judges Can Google Your Evidence, So Make Sure It’s Good

Want to attack the credibility of a piece of evidence in court? That’s certainly your right, but you better make sure that your argument can’t be defeated with a 30-second Google search.  

A federal judge in New York was presiding over a hearing involving a convicted bank robber who had just recently been released from prison on parole. The hearing was to determine if he had violated the terms of his parole by…wait for it…robbing another bank. Among many other pieces of evidence, perhaps the most damning was a yellow rain hat. In the security camera footage of the robbery, the robber was wearing the yellow hat. An identical yellow hat was found at the defendant’s residence (there was no discussion of early eyewitness reports that the man in the yellow hat was accompanied by an unusually-curious monkey).

The defendant’s attorney claimed that most yellow rain hats look roughly the same, so it shouldn’t be a big surprise that the defendant and the robber happened to own the same hat. The judge, acting on a hunch, did a Google search for yellow rain hats. He found that there were a wide variety of such hats available for purchase, and there was enough variety in their appearance that it would be difficult to mistake one for another. Based on this, the judge concluded that the chances that the robber and the defendant just happened to coincidentally own the same hat were quite slim. He ended up sending the defendant back to prison for violating the terms of his supervised release.

The defendant appealed, arguing that this was a violation of the federal rules of evidence, and therefore the evidence from Google shouldn’t have been used.

A federal appeals court just released its opinion on the matter, and held that the judge did nothing wrong by using a search engine to confirm a common-sense intuition.

This makes perfect sense, from both a practical and legal standpoint. First of all, the appeals court was quick to note that the alleged robber was not actually on trial – he was released from prison on certain conditions. One of those conditions, presumably, was that he could not commit any crimes. If he did, it meant a return to prison to serve out the remainder of his sentence. Therefore, the burden of proof on the prosecution is much lower than usual, in these cases. The prosecution only needs to show that it’s more likely than not that the defendant committed the crime, at which point he will be sent back to prison (to serve the remainder of the sentence for the crime of which he was originally convicted).

In these cases, the Federal Rules of Evidence are applies much more liberally. Essentially, in such hearings, any reasonable inferences based on objectively-verifiable facts can be made. Even in trials, when the Rules of Evidence are in full force, a judge can take “judicial notice” of a fact if it is considered common knowledge. Judicial notice simply means acknowledging as true a certain relevant fact, without requiring either party to prove that the fact is true. For example, if a case, for whatever reason, hinged on the question of whether or not the sky is blue, a judge could probably just take judicial notice of the fact that, yes, the sky is blue. Obviously, requiring the parties to present evidence proving a fact which everyone already knows to be true would be a huge waste of time.

If a simple fact such as the existence of multiple designs of yellow hat can be proven with a simple Internet search, judges should be able to do this.

Obviously, I believe that we’ll have to be careful in allowing judges to use the Internet to confirm or disconfirm certain facts. If there’s any reasonable dispute about a relevant fact, the parties should be required to present evidence to prove or disprove it. 

Courts are often not quick to adopt new technology, so it’s encouraging to see a judge making such a common-sense use of technology that’s available to everyone else. Given how busy the judicial system already is, courts should be looking at every possible way to save time and money.

FBI Monitoring Social Networking Sites to Fight Crime

This might make intuitive sense. After all, criminals are often the most reliable early adopters of new technology. Terrorists, drug dealers, gun runners, and other ne’er-do-wells are constantly looking for new ways to communicate without the government listening in, so it makes sense that social networks might be useful as a tool to this end. There’s only one problem: the FBI is monitoring Facebook to deal with rowdy teenagers.

Apparently, authorities in Philadelphia are concerned with a recent spate of incidents involving “flash mobs” of bored teenagers. Flash mobs, for the unaware, are spontaneous meetups organized on the Internet, designed to create public spectacle. At their best, flash mobs are creative, harmless, and entertaining. This one is a classic (hundreds of people in a subway station breaking out in a choreographed song and dance routine during the morning commute, to everybody’s apparent delight). This is another great one (a bunch of people suddenly freezing in place in Grand Central Station).

Leave it to bored teenagers to take something fun, harmless, and benevolent, and turn it into something pointless, nihilistic, and destructive. Apparently, teenagers in Philadelphia, after seeing some of these videos on the internet (and completely missing the point), decided it would be fun to organize flash mobs of their own. The result? Hundreds of kids meeting in a pre-determined location, with nobody having decided what they were supposed to do there. So they ended up fighting amongst themselves, assaulting pedestrians, and vandalizing property. Basically, their version of a flash mob is more like a riot.

City authorities in Philadelphia have had enough. They’ve decided to start monitoring sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter to see what those “no-good kids” are up to, and have sought, and secured, the help of the FBI in doing so.

Now, to be perfectly clear, I think that what these teenagers are doing is inexcusable. The utter pointlessness of this violence is particularly disturbing, and perhaps reveals something very unpleasant about the current state of society. Of course, every generation has been saying this about the generation that came before it, so maybe I’m just getting old. Still, government authorities have the right and duty to take every lawful effort to prevent violence against their citizens.

However, this seems like a job much better-suited to local authorities, rather than the FBI. Given that this appears to be a matter of purely local concern, and the FBI (being a federal agency, and all) primarily deals with crimes that transcend state and national borders, there seems to be little reason why the FBI needs to involve itself in this matter.

Furthermore, this raises at least some concerns about government snooping and privacy. Given some recent court rulings concerning online privacy and the government’s right to search emails, I think these concerns are legitimate.

Now, social networking sites are inherently different from email. First of all, they aren’t nearly as essential for communications as email has become, so it could reasonably be argued that a person can simply choose not to use a social networking site if they don’t want to (FarmVille addiction notwithstanding). Furthermore, people who post information and communications on social networking sites are voluntarily making available to a large number of viewers (though not necessarily the general public), meaning that they have much less of a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Still, most social networking sites now give users the ability to control exactly who sees their information (limiting access to friends and family, for example). This seems to create a reasonable expectation that nobody other than the people you have approved will see your information. If the FBI, or any other law enforcement entity circumvents these privacy protections to see what you’re up to, it’s at least arguable that your reasonable expectation of privacy has been breached.

To say the least, the authorities will have to tread lightly on this one. We all want to see this type of destructive behavior curtailed, and maybe this can be accomplished with a few high-profile convictions. After all, most teenagers like to put up a tough façade, but are scared little children on the inside. It would be a shame for charges against some of these kids or their parents to get thrown out on a technicality involving an improper search.

By: Rusty Shackleford

Madness, Mayhem, and Ear-Biting.

“Mayhem” isn’t a word you see a lot of.

Sure, it might slip into the sales pitch for a shoot-em-up game or roll off a preacher’s tongue at a sermon, but chances are that you and your buddy aren’t going to be throwing it around over coffee. Well—unless you’re both die-hard Palahniuk fans and planning your own Project Mayhem. But even then, “mayhem” isn’t exactly a household noun.

In fact, “mayhem” wasn’t a noun at all when it first came into use. Evan Morris, who writes a column on word origins called “The Word Detective,” unearths the word’s roots:

"Mayhem," meaning "the infliction of violent injury on a person or thing," comes from the Anglo-Norman "maihem," or injury, which also gave us "maim." In fact, for much of their history in English since the 13th century, "maim" and "mayhem" have been nearly interchangeable words. One could "mayhem" one's neighbor, who would then have a "maim," or lasting wound or injury.

The word retains some of its original meaning in the legal world—the world that this blog loves the most! In legalese, “mayhem” is assault with the intent to maim or disfigure. Is it really a surprise that the word has come to be synonymous with violent chaos and disorder?

 

Let's examine the legal specifics of a mayhem charge.

One can only be charged with mayhem if he or she has maliciously and unlawfully removed, disfigured, or rendered useless another person’s arm, hand, finger, leg, foot, toe, tongue, eye, nose, ear, or lips.  Unsurprisingly, mayhem is a fairly serious felony.

If you’ve had the grave misfortune to have lost a piece or two of yourself to a violent encounter (and we’re not talking broken hearts and angry breakups), a good criminal lawyer is definitely in the cards for you. And if you’ve maybe, accidentally, kind of sunk your teeth into someone and bitten off their ear, you definitely want to ring up a criminal defense lawyer before you spend the next 20 years wearing stripes.

by Kate Beall

School Shootings, "Delinquent Acts," and Juvenile Justice.

Today’s hostage situation at Las Plumas High School was a bitter reminder that youth violence problems in the United States have yet to be resolved. Though nobody was injured at the California school this morning, the firearms and hostages recall a number of incidents in past years—at Virginia Tech, Red Lake, Columbine, and other schools. And while Columbine may be pointed at as the catalyst for much of today’s publicized youth violence, it was not the first school shooting in U.S. history.  Events at the University of Texas at Austin (1966) and Parkway South Junior High (1983) are two of several shootings that predate the Columbine massacre.

But even as we honor and remember the victims of these incidents, we are forced to decide how to deal with the youths who have committed these crimes. When is it alright to try minors as adults, and who is empowered to make the decision to do so? In cases like that of this Bethell County youth, the decision remains unclear.

In most states, youths under the age of 18 are tried by the Juvenile Justice System, where they are prosecuted for “delinquent acts” as opposed to actual crimes. However, many states will automatically have a juvenile tried as an adult if they have committed violent crimes (murder, armed robbery, rape, etc.) and are over a certain age (usually 14 years-old and older). In these cases, it can be useful to understand the differences between the Juvenile vs. Adult criminal system.

If you have further questions about juvenile crime or requirements for trial as an adult, please visit our Criminal Law Forum. There you can find links to a variety of helpful articles, get answers from experienced members, or discuss recent events in criminal law.

For an experienced Juvenile Law attorney in your area, click here.

 

By Kate Beall