Jonathan Kay on James Holmes, Sam Harris, and the morally terrifying case against free will
At his court appearance this week, James Holmes made a strong case for an insanity plea, without even opening his mouth. The Colorado mass-shooting suspect — who has dyed his hair a lurid shade of red, and refers to himself as “The Joker” — looked as if his brain were on another planet.
Holmes is 24 years old, around the age when the symptoms of schizophrenia typically become acute. Cho Seung-Hui, the mentally unstable Viginia Tech shooter, was 23 when he killed 32 people in 2007. John Hinckley, Jr. was 25 when he tried to kill Ronald Reagan, thinking that this would win him the affections of Jodie Foster. At trial, the lead psychiatric expert for the defense successfully argued that Hinckley was insane — specifically, that he suffered from schizophrenia, depression, “suicidal features,” and an “autistic retreat from reality.”
In other words, Hinckley was nuts. In the period leading up to his assassination attempt, he imagined he was Travis Bickle from the movie Taxi Driver, and also sometimes slipped into the notion that he was John Lennon in some sort of resurrected form. His notes to Foster began as love letters, but over time became weird and demented.
Yet, despite all these facts, Americans were outraged when a Washington jury came back with an insanity verdict. In the years following, numerous U.S. states responded to the Hinckley acquittal by tightening their standards for gauging insanity. (Three — Idaho, Montana and Utah — abolished the insanity defense altogether.) A national poll, taken the day after the verdict was read, found that five out of six Americans thought “justice was not done.”
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We're all schizophrenics now: Jonathan Kay on James Holmes, Sam Harris, and the morally terrifying case against free will | Full Comment | National Post
At his court appearance this week, James Holmes made a strong case for an insanity plea, without even opening his mouth. The Colorado mass-shooting suspect — who has dyed his hair a lurid shade of red, and refers to himself as “The Joker” — looked as if his brain were on another planet.
Holmes is 24 years old, around the age when the symptoms of schizophrenia typically become acute. Cho Seung-Hui, the mentally unstable Viginia Tech shooter, was 23 when he killed 32 people in 2007. John Hinckley, Jr. was 25 when he tried to kill Ronald Reagan, thinking that this would win him the affections of Jodie Foster. At trial, the lead psychiatric expert for the defense successfully argued that Hinckley was insane — specifically, that he suffered from schizophrenia, depression, “suicidal features,” and an “autistic retreat from reality.”
In other words, Hinckley was nuts. In the period leading up to his assassination attempt, he imagined he was Travis Bickle from the movie Taxi Driver, and also sometimes slipped into the notion that he was John Lennon in some sort of resurrected form. His notes to Foster began as love letters, but over time became weird and demented.
Yet, despite all these facts, Americans were outraged when a Washington jury came back with an insanity verdict. In the years following, numerous U.S. states responded to the Hinckley acquittal by tightening their standards for gauging insanity. (Three — Idaho, Montana and Utah — abolished the insanity defense altogether.) A national poll, taken the day after the verdict was read, found that five out of six Americans thought “justice was not done.”
more
We're all schizophrenics now: Jonathan Kay on James Holmes, Sam Harris, and the morally terrifying case against free will | Full Comment | National Post
