(April 16, 2013) Mental illness does not excuse murder, but killings "spawned in psychosis should be adjudicated differently from those for profit, jealousy or revenge," wrote author Pete Earley in a Washington Post op-ed published last week.
Earley, author of Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness, wrote the opinion in response to Colorado prosecutor George Brauchler's declaration that "justice is death" for James Holmes, the accused gunman in last summer's theater massacre in Aurora. Holmes's attorneys had sought a life sentence without possibility of parole in exchange for a guilty plea.
In the op-ed, Earley says the legal system "does a poor job of dealing with mentally ill defendants" ("The mentally ill require a different calculation for the death penalty").
"The standard legal test is whether the defendant knew at the time of the crime the difference between right and wrong and whether he understood the consequences of his actions," writes Earley. "But that's often a fool's reasoning when applied to an ill person's mind."
Individuals who kill while in the grip of psychotic symptoms are regularly executed in the United States, essentially creating a triple tragedy. First, the perpetrator doesn't get the treatment for severe mental illness he or she needs to function safely in society. Second, others die as a consequence of the non-treatment. Third, the individual who killed is killed for acts that resulted from an untreated disease. Fourth, as Earley writes, "victims (of the tragedy) face a protracted public trial, decades of legal appeals and appellate hearings in which they will be required to rehash their nightmares."
Preventable tragedies are deplorable. Systematic neglect of their cause and solution is inexcusable.
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