Penalty @ MindSay

While a plea for insanity is every criminal's right, rarely are the People's rights considered when determining if the mentally ill and the criminally insane should be punished for their crimes? Or if they should be treated first and then released back into our neighborhoods?

The potentially insane are often diagnosed as bossy, controlling and domineering manic depressants (similar to the bunch connected to domestic violence situations) that take medication for depression and often turn out to be unpredictable. Most of us know unpredictability has a huge price tag attached to violence because unpredictable individuals under the influence of drugs are dangerous. And since the People can never be certain what manic depressants will do next, society is not safe.

Nonetheless, despite their crimes, the legal system does not often take into account that a criminal's behavior may be dangerous because most criminals seem perfectly normal in the light of day. Is this seemingly normal outlook the legal system's justification to release them back into our communities? How can the law suggest that they are not criminally responsible for their actions and claim they do not pose a threat to the community? For that reason, criminals, absent of any moral compass are let off the hook and escape being formally condemned as responsible for their acts.

This attitude has openly suggested to the mentally ill and the criminally insane that the justice system will likely show sympathy toward those who claim insanity. Can the justice system be so naive not to figure out that with help from their lawyers, criminals who know they have committed a crime are adroitly using the insanity plea to escape punishment?

For instance, let's reflect a moment on the history teacher who was legally found to be mentally ill after he killed a teenage boy. This guy tied the boy in the basement of his home and forced the boy to perform oral sex. When the boy refused, the teacher castrated the boy and then shot him in the head.

Furthermore, it was revealed in court that the teacher premeditated the act in the back of his head to one day execute the boy. Did a mentally ill individual or a criminally insane psycho commit this act?

The time must come for the justice system, Legislators, and Congress to use their power to change the laws and force a bill, to understand the extent of a criminal's actions. The time must come for those in power to grasp the fact that many of the criminals they release back into our neighborhoods their wives, children and girlfriends. (A small exception should be made on behalf of those who attack strangers. Most who fit this category are mentally ill and should not be put in prison. They must be locked up in a mental institution.)

Why do the people in power continue to permit criminals to control our communities?

Perhaps they have not had anything villainous happen to them in their lives so that they are blind to what is happening to our nation when the ill and the insane are allowed to go free and victimize our society? No one is safe as long as those who are in power keep offering criminals the freedom to murder people and destroy our nation. It is demoralizing that the law is more than not pro-criminal.

It is pathetic when the law does not set real standards for criminal responsibility, and linger in limbo while juggling to determine if an accused qualifies for the insanity defense. This anti-People approach will ultimately cause the American people to mistrust those running the system and consider them to be behaving as cowards. Knowing well what is happening in this country, what are the citizens to do when their outcry for justice is ignored?

The People have little control once the judge makes his final decision. In most cases involving accused criminals pleading innocent by reason of insanity, the People rarely have the courtesy of a jury. Unless the case at hand receives nationwide attention, 70 percent of insanity pleas are made by plea bargain in which both prosecution and defense agree to the plea and there is no trial.

For instance, the cases of would be Reagan assassin John Hinckley, Jeffrey Dahmer, Kevin McKiever, who viciously stabbed a former Radio City Rockette and Colin Ferguson, who turned a crowded, rush hour train into a shooting gallery, killing six passengers and wounding nineteen. These cases were considered special and worthy media-attention cases.

However, there are hush-hush cases not talked about because they lack the kind of "sensationalism," with which the media thrive. Another issue to address is directed at attorneys who fashion the insanity defense. They defend psychos and do their best to release criminals into the streets to kill again. How do attorneys defend psychos and sleep at night? How can they help criminals to walk away from punishment to breathe air they should not be breathing when they should be jailed for life with criminals like themselves? At this rate, it is frightening to think about how many criminals will claim innocence by reason of insanity the day New York decides to re-instate the death penalty.

Many citizens believe that when defendants use the insanity defense, they are sometimes mentally ill. Most of the time they are crafty con artists trying to get off the hook by playing crazy even in the face of a mandated personality test to determine the mental status of the accused, and forensic psychologists who evaluate the competency of those accused of committing crimes. They diagnose whether the accused claiming insanity is exaggerating or minimizing their symptoms and if they can be held criminally responsible for their acts. Mental health professionals are frequently left to wrestle with an individual's moral responsibility.

Surveys of prison populations have claimed that there are higher rates of mental illness, mental retardation, brain damage and substance abuse among prison inmates than in the general population. How do we know this is accurate? We know that sometimes, when someone volunteers to make a survey public, there is usually a larger number behind the curtain withheld from the public to avoid public panic.

Many mentally ill and criminally insane individuals are indeed clever and manipulative con artists skilled to commit devious acts in private to escape getting caught committing crimes. Who knows for sure? We may have as many nuts in prison as we do running the streets disguised as normal individuals. And who knows? Tomorrow may be different. If we can count on anything, it is that everything must change, including Congress, the legislators and the justice system.