Insanity: Murder, Madness, and the Law

by Charles Patrick Ewing

The insanity defense is one of the oldest fixtures of the Anglo-American legal tradition. Though it is available to people charged with virtually any crime, and is often employed without controversy, homicide defendants who raise the insanity defense are often viewed by the public and even the legal system as trying to get away with murder. Often it seems that legal result of an insanity defense is unpredictable, and is determined not by the defendants mental state, but by their lawyers and psychologists influence.

From the thousands of murder cases in which defendants have claimed insanity, Doctor Ewing has chosen ten of the most influential and widely varied. Some were successful in their insanity plea, while others were rejected. Some of the defendants remain household names years after the fact, like Jack Ruby, while others were never nationally publicized. Regardless of the circumstances, each case considered here was extremely controversial, hotly contested, and relied heavily on lengthy testimony by expert psychologists and psychiatrists. Several of them played a major role in shaping the criminal justice system as we know it today.

In this book, Ewing skillfully conveys the psychological and legal drama of each case, while providing important and fresh professional insights. For the legal or psychological professional, as well as the interested reader, Insanity will take you into the minds of some of the most incomprehensible murderers of our age.

Genres: Nonfiction, True Crime, Psychology

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Katherine Addison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review of ten murder trials in which the defendant pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity (Jacob Rubenstein [aka Jack Ruby], Robert Torsney, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, Jr., Arthur Shawcross, Scott Panetti, Eric Smith, Andrew Goldstein, Eric Michael Clark, Andrea Yates). "Insanity," I should note, is a legal term and has sometimes only a tangential relationship to mental illness; it's the inability to know the nature of one's actions (i.e., the inability to know that one's actions constitute homicide) and/or the inability to know that one's actions are wrong (for example, Andrea Yates knew she was murdering her children, but due to her mental illness, she believed she had to murder them to save them from Hell, so she did not know that her actions were wrong. Notice that there's a slippery point there around the word "know" and kinds of knowledge.). It's also worth noting that only in two cases was the defense successful (Torsney and Yates, and I sincerely doubt from Ewing's review of the case that Torsney was insane, or even mentally ill), even though, for example, Panetti's mental illness--and basic incompetency to stand trial--was excruciatingly obvious. Ewing talks about why the insanity plea fails: (a) legal insanity is very hard to prove, and (b) the inevitable battle of the expert witnesses. For every witness the defense finds to say the defendant is insane, the prosecution will find a witness--or two--to say the defendant isn't. Also, for some esoteric legal reason, jurors are not allowed to know the outcome of deciding a defendant is not guilty by reason of insanity, and often assume that it means the defendant will walk free, making them understandably reluctant to vote that way.

In essence, Ewing says, the insanity defense is a Hail Mary pass: it may not work, but in that situation, it's the only option for mounting any kind of defense at all.

[helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

i may be biased because i just finished this book for my criminal law class, and my professor wrote it, but all in all i REALLY liked it. he has a great writing style, and for anyone (especially an upstate new yorker) interested in the criminal law system and the insanity defense, this book is really something. it gets pretty technical with psychological/psychiatric testing in these insanity trials, but ewing does a good job explaining a lot of that for laypeople.