Insane on All Counts

By WALTER ISAACSON

After torturous deliberations, a jury acquits John Hinckley

"As to the first count, not guilty, by reason of insanity." There was a gasp in the courtroom.

John Hinckley Jr., who had fired a revolver full of explosive bullets at President Ronald Reagan to prove his love for Movie Actress Jodie Foster, had been acquitted of attempted assassination. The young drifter who shot his way onto history's center stage stood silently at the defense table, closed his vacuous eyes, and tilted back his head.

Judge Barrington Parker's flat recital continued through the 13 assault, murder and weapons counts. ". . . On count five, not guilty by reason of insanity." That was for the bullet into the stomach of Secret Service Agent Timothy McCarthy. ". . . On count seven, not guilty by reason of insanity." For the bullet that tore through the brain of James Brady, the once ebullient press secretary. ". . . On count ten, not guilty by reason of insanity." For the bullet into the neck of Police Officer Thomas Delahanty. Judge Parker's voice, usually calm and assured, began to quaver. ". . . On count twelve, not guilty by reason of insanity"--for the illegal possession of the handgun bought for $47 in a Dallas pawnshop. And finally, for using that gun in a federal crime: "Not guilty by reason of insanity."

JoAnn Hinckley, the defendant's mother, covered her face. She sobbed, embraced her husband and then, though she tried not to, she smiled. So did her husband, the Colorado oil millionaire who last year kicked their boy out of the house and this month wept as he testified: "I wish to God I could trade places with him right now." But the dull blue eyes of their wayward son, pasted like wafers on his expressionless face, avoided the gaze of those in the courtroom through the very end. What emotions swirled in his twisted psyche--a mystery that neither psychiatrists nor jury felt they could fathom--were kept inside. John Hinckley had got off--and raised a nationwide furor about insanity and the law.

For everyone involved but the phlegmatic Hinckley, the trauma of deciding his fate--a process that cost as much as $2.5 million*--was a wrenching ordeal. In the end, the awesome responsibility of sorting out the conflicting testimony and bewildering law fell on five men and seven women. A janitor, a cafeteria worker, a garage attendant, all but one black, they were not a jury of Hinckley's peers except in the legal sense. For 24 hours spread over four days they vacillated until, almost as an act of despair, they reached a decision that left them uneasy and bitter about their experience.

If John Hinckley's bullets seemed to hit dangerously close to the heart of a nation, his acquittal struck explosively at its sense of moral righteousness. Said Bell County, Texas, District Attorney Arthur Eads: "Only in the U.S. can a man try to assassinate the leader of the country in front of 125 million people and be found not guilty." That fact, insisted well-known Wyoming Trial Lawyer Gerry Spence, proves "we're a people of law and compassion." But most Americans agreed with Eads that the verdict was symptomatic of runaway leniency in the system. A nationwide poll by ABC News "Nightline" reported that 75% of the 505 people interviewed thought that the jury's finding was unjust. A headline in the Indianapolis News declared: HINCKLEY INSANE, PUBLIC MAD.

The focus of most of the outrage was the insanity defense (see following story). "It's the system which found him innocent that's insane," editorialized Hinckley's home-town newspaper, the Denver Post. California Governor Jerry Brown denounced "a legal system that totally disregards the issue of guilt or innocence and instead relies on so-called psychiatric experts to tell us whether a man who committed a deliberate attack should be acquitted because he watched too many movies." On Capitol Hill, shock at the verdict was quickly translated into pressure for legislation. "This case demonstrates there is something fundamentally wrong with the expanded modern insanity defense," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania called five of the jurors to testify before a special Senate hearing on ways to make the insanity law clearer.

The Senators were particularly anxious to clear up an inconsistency that cropped up at the Hinckley trial: Who bears the burden of proving the defendant was sane or insane? In federal cases, the prosecution must prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that the defendant was legally sane at the time of the crime. In many states, the defense must show, usually by a "preponderance" of evidence, that a suspect was insane in order to win acquittal. Judge Parker chose to use the stricter guidelines in order to avoid giving the defense technical grounds for appeal. This put the burden of proof on the prosecution. A person is defined as insane, he instructed, if he, "as a result of mental disease or defect, either lacked substantial capacity to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law or lacked substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct."

When the door to the sparse jury room slammed shut on Friday afternoon, this complex task seemed overwhelming. The psychiatrists who had testified for the prosecution and defense seemed to contradict one another totally. Said Maryland Copelin, 50, who works in a school cafeteria: "If the expert psychiatrists could not decide whether the man was sane, then how are we supposed to decide?"

To choose a foreman, the jurors put their names into a hat. Since he was the only one with a hat, Roy Jackson, 64, a retired janitor, did the drawing. His random choice: himself. He smiled warily. Evelyn Washington, 27, suggested that they pray. "Lord, please guide us," she began. And then out of her Bible she read from the 24th Psalm: "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? He that has clean hands and a pure heart."

George Blyther, 38, was the first to offer an opinion. "Not guilty because of insanity," he said. Jackson said that he leaned toward guilty. So did most of the women, including the only white juror, Merryanna Swartz. Some observers thought that Swartz, 31, might be pivotal because she works as a pathology researcher and has dealt with disturbed adolescents. But she remained generally quiet, and shifted her vote to not guilty over the course of the deliberations. As the discussion progressed, everyone agreed that they were still far from decided. "So we took out the evidence and put our personal feelings aside," recalls Belinda Drake, 23, a secretary at the Pentagon.

For Drake, the forlorn letters Hinckley wrote offered insight. "It just seemed like he was a sick white boy looking for someone to love him," she recalls. They reread aloud the note Hinckley wrote to Jodie Foster on the day of the shooting. "There is a definite possibility that I will be killed in my attempt to get Reagan," he scribbled. Glynis Lassiter, 42, a janitor at American University, argued that Hinckley was clearly insane "if he felt he was going to get killed and then he goes ahead and does it anyway." Copelin strongly disagreed. "Look at this," she said, pointing to letters to prove that Hinckley was conniving rather than crazy. "When he wanted money he would sign his letters 'Love, John.' When he didn't get it, he would write back and sign just 'John.' "

On Saturday the jurors moved into the now empty courtroom for their longest, and most tense, day of deliberations. A debate flared over whether Hinckley's erratic cross-country travels showed him to be crazy. Said Copelin: "We went in our minds everywhere Hinckley went. When he flew, we flew. When his father met him at the airport and told him to go to the Y.M.C.A., and when he took the bus, we took the bus." They even tried to calculate how much all this cost the rich drifter. To Lassiter, the janitor, the aimless meanderings indicated a mental defect. He argued: "Nobody, no matter how much money he has, would spend it like that. He pays a jet fare and stays a day. I can't see that." Countered Copelin: "Any time you can buy airplane tickets and go anywhere you want, and get money to do it, you're sane." The most outspoken advocate for conviction was Nathalia Brown, 30, a power company worker, who said: "If he was responsible enough to come all the way to Washington, check into a hotel and pull the trigger several times, he was sane."

Hinckley's twisted poetry also became a matter of dispute. Asked Blyther: "Could a sane person have written it? Obviously something is wrong with him." Drake, who said she likes to write too, disagreed. "This man is a writer and writers are strange. He is not stranger than they are because he was infatuated with Jodie Foster. He shot four people." The argument turned on whether poetry should be considered factual or if, as Prosecutor Roger Adelman had insisted during the trial, fictional. "Poetry is not fiction," Lassiter argued vehemently. They all tended to agree. To make sure, they requested a dictionary to look up the definitions of "poetry" and "fiction," but the judge turned them down.

The most important event of Sunday came late in the evening when Dianne Ham, 33, went to Copelin's room to talk about switching foremen. They agreed that Jackson seemed uncomfortable in the position. In a nearby room, Lawrence Coffey was awake in bed coming to his own decision about Hinckley. "I lay there thinking about his letters to Jodie and to his parents," the burly hotel banquet assistant recalls. "I felt sure he wasn't in his right mind when he shot those people."

"Isn't it hard on you?" one juror asked the foreman, Jackson, the next morning. "No, it ain't hard," he replied. "Maybe someone else should do it," said one member, pointing out Jackson's stutter. The retired janitor agreed. He was promptly replaced by Coffey, at 22 the youngest juror, who was now firmly convinced of Hinckley's innocence. The deliberations began to stumble toward a conclusion.

As foreman, Jackson had often asked those favoring an insanity verdict, "Y'all know, he shot the President. How are we going to deal with that?" By Monday he had dispelled those doubts from his own mind. "Well, he is a little sick," Jackson noted of Hinckley. Copelin and Brown were still holding firm. Argued Brown strenuously: "The issue is not whether he was a little off, or whether this poem or that one didn't make sense. He shot those people, he shot them on purpose, he planned the whole thing out. He should be punished." When the rest disagreed, she shouted: "What gives here! The man is just a manipulator. Ain't nothing wrong with him!"

As Monday evening approached, the sequestered jury was on edge: they missed their families and simple pleasures like watching television, which Parker had forbidden. Brown's last ally, Copelin, began to waver. As she explained later: "I was tired. Nobody seemed to think there was any other way. We felt locked in by the law." After she switched to not guilty, Brown held out for another ten minutes. Finally, she threw up her arms. "To hell with it," she shouted. "If you all can't see what's happening here, I can't help you."

The jury broke for dinner before the tally was fully recorded on the long yellow forms. Coffey dug heartily into the barbecued ribs. Nathalia Brown could not eat, she was so upset. Evelyn Washington refused dinner and went off to a corner to read her Bible. When they reconvened, she stood up to ask, "Is everybody sure they want to vote this way?" Each, in turn, answered, "I'm sure."

After the verdict was read to the court, the dozen deliberators returned to the jury room for the last time. Many of the women started sobbing. "My conscience had me voting one way, but the law would not allow me to vote that way," claimed Copelin afterward. Said Drake: "If the people who are being critical were in the jury room with us, they'd come to the same decision." Coffey agrees. "We did the best job with what we had to work with," he said. "Hinckley is messed up. All we can do now is hope he gets the right help."

Hinckley will be held as a patient at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, in a 225-patient pavilion reserved for the criminally insane, until the court decides that he is no longer a danger to society or himself. In a reversal of roles, Hinckley's attorneys could find themselves arguing that their client is sane to get him released. But his lawyers and parents say they do not plan to make such an argument yet, at least not at the hearing scheduled by Parker on Aug. 7. For the time being, and perhaps for years to come, Hinckley will fulfill the tormented vision of one of his haunting poems:

The martyr in me played games And I was the young alienated loner . . . I have become what I wanted To be all along, a psychopathic poet.

--By Walter Isaacson. Reported by David S. Jackson and Gary Lee/Washington

* Including more than $900,000 for U.S. marshals, at least $400,000 for defense and prosecution psychiatrists and $40,000 for jurors' costs.

With reporting by David S. Jackson, Gary Lee

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