Insanity

INSANITY DEFENSE

August 3, 2006

In Seattle this week, a woman is dead, and several others are being treated for gunshot wounds. A man is in jail for the crime, perhaps to be tried for his life. Those shot are Jewish; their mere presence at a Jewish Community Center put their lives in jeopardy. The shooter is a Muslim man of Pakistani origins—angry, says the newscast, over Israel’s bombing of Lebanon. His crime is worse than murder, says the newscast, a hate crime, to be punished more severely than a mundane shooting. The prosecutor will decide between life in prison without parole and the death penalty.

The woman’s funeral was held yesterday. A thousand people attended, and I wondered, why only one thousand? Why not the whole city? Why not me? We didn’t know her, of course. Yet her shocking murder jolted us. It made all of us sad, and ashamed, and afraid. What do you do with that grief, especially so often repeated?

Yet, says the newscast, the gunman is also diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The defense attorney, when there is one, will plead for mercy on the grounds of his insanity. Given the narrow definition of insanity in the courts, the fact that he is undoubtedly mentally ill may not be enough to save him. Sometime in the months ahead, a court will make the awe-full decision: will he be given treatment, or punishment? Will he be healed, or condemned?

These polar choices make me wonder whether our court system is not also bipolar. It makes me wonder about our society. There is a thing we call a “crime of passion,” where a man is so hopelessly fixated on owning and controlling a woman that, if she tries to escape his grasp or enflames his jealousies in any way, he might murder her (along with any other man with whom she is involved). This sad mockery of love, destroying the very object of one’s supposed devotion, is passion, alright, but it is not love. Yet we make allowances for it. Until recently, husbands in particular, sometimes wives, were often exonerated because of it.

In the Seattle case, the crime is also one of passion. But because the passion is an insane kind of hate, rather than the parody of love, we have passed laws to aggravate, not mitigate, the penalty. We have sympathy for the one, perhaps even recognizing something of ourselves in him, our fear of rejection and abandonment. We have horror at the other, the shadow side of our societal personality, perhaps recognizing something of ourselves in it, too. But hate is the unacceptable passion, and we consign it to the prison, where it can be kept under lock and key, perhaps even put to death.

I have begun to realize that hate IS insanity. All hate. I do not say that anyone who hates is without blame, or that we should open the prisons and close the courts. But I do say that your system of determining who is to blame for his actions and who is not is a mess. We were wrong to abandon the very idea of rehabilitation and return to outright punishment and revenge after so short and half-hearted an experiment. Every act of justice should be about two things simultaneously and in balance: protection of society and rehabilitation of deeply troubled persons who would prey upon it.

Sadly, the drive to wreak vengeance upon wrongdoers in place of treating, healing making whole sick, socio-pathic, or brainwashed individuals is itself sick. We self-identify with victims of crimes, and we call it compassion. We deny our own darkness, pretending that criminals are categorically different for ourselves, and we substitute vengeance for justice.

But compassion, if it is genuine, can extend to the people who were shot, and to the man who did the shooting, too. All suffer because of the sickness and sin of the situation. And justice, if it is genuine, must be informed by compassion.