Thanks for everyone’s responses.
Mernieth, and Lissa - your point about a halfway house is a good one. Certainly that’s what’s being discussed in the the case I linked in my OP. But, the implication is that if his time in the group home is as good as the professionals are predicting, that is only a temporary step.
Which is why I was talking about release to the community, since that is the ultimate goal.
rainy, I have to say that your position is one that scares me. Like Doc Cathode, I suffer from mental illness. Your position, and to a lesser extent, the position espoused by Tevildo, scares me. And frustrates me. I can’t even get a job because of my history of mental illness, no matter that I’ve never hurt anyone while too depressed to work. (Physically, that is. My actions caused great pain to my family - but that’s not exactly something that the law has any role in.)
To take examples from the headlines: Mark Hacking - the Arizona man who’s accused to killing his pregnant wife because his fabricated life was about to blow up in his face. So, in his illness, he decided that to spare her the disappointment of learning the truth, he’d kill her, instead. While I don’t doubt that Mark Hacking has serious mental health problems, his behavior - hiding the body, disposing of evidences, and so on - was that of a man who could still think rationally, and consider that what he did was wrong. So, while he may even be insane, he’s not a candidate for being found not guilty because of his insanity.
Then we’ve got James Yang, from my OP. Who did nothing to hide the body - was not capable of planning anything, it appears from the article. Who believed, apparantly, that his mother was a threat to his life, and soul. That the reasons for that belief are insane doesn’t change that he was acting at the time within the normal bounds of behavior: killing in self-defense is allowed, and there have been enough cases that remove even the need for an immediate threat to support this. (IIRC, the “Burning Bed” murder case was one such.) That, generally, the courts and the law frown on that doesn’t mean that it’s an unreasonable conclusion for someone to draw. It is often a wrong one, but not unreasonable.
(BTW, Mernieth, how is my hypothetical too unrealistic? The only things changed from the article about James Yang was the assumption that all of us here on the Dope could be assured that the medical types have evidence to back up their claim that my hypothetical killer is responding well to treatment, and his illness can be kept in remission with medications.)
I read, several years ago, a book by a psychiartrist - who’d often been involved in insanity cases before the courts. He listed case histories of some six or seven cases. And in that whole book there was only one case of a person being found not guilty be reason of insanity. If I could remember the book’s title, or author, or even anything but the vaguest details of the one case I’d recommend it. He made it very clear that the legal defition for being found not guilty by reason of insanity is no simple standard to meet. For that matter, Susan Smith didn’t meet it. For all that anyone looking at her case has to realize she was a very ill woman.
Let me take a moment, now, to talk about schizophrenia - the specific diagnosis that James Yang has. This is not, actually, that the patient has seperate personalities, like Sybel. Rather, it usually manifests as the patient hearing voices. For really bad cases they’ll be hearing these voices all the time. The voices can be benign, or vile. Or simply mundane. There’s no way to guess without talking to the patient. But, can you imagine having someone in your head, always talking to you, whom you can’t shut up? That’s the best description I’ve gotten from someone who’d had a problem with schizophrenia. Onset is usually associated with puberty, but anything can trigger it: stress, especially.
So, it becomes quite possible for someone who was fine last week, to start suffering from this disease. And, in part because of the stigma attached to seeking psychiatric care, it is not unusual for people to simply hope it will go away. Rather than getting help, while they’re still sane enough to recognize that something’s wrong. What’s worse is that family and friends can re-inforce that thinking, especially for those with late onset mental illness: “You never needed a shrink before this, why see one now? You’ve just got to be strong.” This attitude is one that I’ve seen is especially common in people with minimal education. I have to admit that I wonder whether James Yang’s mother had been one of those sorts.
If you’ve ever experience hypnagogic hallucinations, that is a pretty good measuring stick for what schizophrenia can feel like from the inside. Except that’s all the time. (The wikipedia article I’ve linked isn’t innaccurate, I don’t think - just not complete. It focuses on the benefits of hypnogogia, rather than how unsettling it is to be “awake” and hearing a voice calling your name, or seeing bugs that aren’t there.)
What I’m trying to say is that it is completely credible for me to hear about a person falling completely into the miasma of schizophrenia, listening to the advice and direction of the voices, without ever quite realizing that they’re sick, and could be treated.
But, and this is the key point to all my words, with modern medications such attacks can be controlled. It’s often a matter of trial and error to find the medication that will treat a specific person’s disorder, and even after medication has been found, it’s not a silver bullet, making everything well. Even after the initial cause is found and treated, the habits of thought that are insane still have to be dealt with.
So, all in all, we’re talking about a years long process to fight for one’s sanity. And it is a fight. Many people who end up that far gone don’t make it back. Others kill themselves, finding that the medications rob them of pleasure in life. But, in my hypothetical, we’ve got a man who’s come back about 90% of the way. (I don’t say 100%, because he’ll never be the person he had been before the crime occured.) The people familiar with his case feel he is no longer a threat to himself or others. If “Not guilty by reason of insanity” is to mean anything other than a means of committing someone to a mental institution for life, without chance of parole, then for the rare ones who do win back their sanity - we have to accept that we made a bargain, and they can come back out again.
I don’t suggest leaving them to go unmonitored. Rights that belong to the normal person can be restricted when dealing with someone who has shown such behavioral problems. So, keeping them on medications as a condition of release, and blood/urine testing to make sure that he continues don’t seem out of line to me. Nor does requiring regular sessions with a therapist.
Now, D_Odds and Doc Cathode, I don’t think that the government has a right to treat persons who’ve not committed any wrong as someone on parole just because they have a mental illness. Regardless of how it would affect my own liberties, I don’t like it because it will raise the percieved costs to the patient who looks for help. Anything that increases the real stigma associated with mental illness, making it seem more of a burden to seek help will, in the long run, be counter-productive, in my opinion.
And avoiding help, isolating, and just hoping it will all get better is part of what happened with Andrea Yates.