Well let’s see, he only tried to assassinate President Reagan. But that was a long time ago, let’s let bygones be bygones. Afterall, his parents are very wealthy, but I’m sure that had nothing to do with the mild sentence he received. I would think spending all this time at Club Fed has taught Johnny that shooting Presidents is bad thing to do. So, yeah, let’s let Johnny roam the streets on his own free will, he’s paid his dues to society (and we miss him at the country club too).
In the first place, they’re not talking about setting him free. They’re talking about very short unsupervised home visits.
In the second place, I would not consider a sentence of being confined to a mental hospital until he is sane again to be mild. High security mental hospitals are not far removed from prisons.
In the third place, someday he will will be free. That is the whole point of being found insane. When you are sane again, you get to go free.
You don’t like it? Too bad. Perhaps you can comfort yourself in the knowledge that the political fallout from his case resulted in making an already rare and difficult insanity plea even rarer and more difficult.
He had them convinced that he was well enough to be set loose for unsupervised visits a number of years ago, and even eventually be set free. It was about that time that they discovered his secret correspondence with Charles Manson.
John Hinckley is charming and manipulative. He is still quite mentally ill. And please, let’s not forget that he tried to kill a person. Let’s leave aside that it was President Reagan.
He shot somebody to impress an actress, so she’d go out with him.
That’s the definition of batshit crazy, and is why he’s locked up.
He should never go anywhere outside the institution unsupervised. Ever.
How can his sanity ever be unquestionably pronounced stable? He proved one thing, the opinion of doctors being irrelevant on this poiint: he stalked and shot human beings with a gun. Wounded human beings. Maimed human beings.
If he hadn’t taken an insanity plea, and if his victim weren’t the president, there’s a good chance he’d out by now.
Not too long ago, a fellow who had served fifteen years for a very similar offense (attempted murder with a handgun) was released from the prison in which my husband works.
I don’t know that John Hinkley is necessarily more dangerous than any other parolled attempted murderer.
well, okay, set him free, but nobody should suggest that someone should tell him that it would really, really impress jodie foster if he were to take out shrub:smack:
The sickest thing to me about John Hinckley was (or is) infatuated with Jodie Foster. Jodie Foster. Supposedly in the hospital, he still had pictures of her. Jodie Foster.
Anybody who finds Jodie Foster the object of sexual lust and desire is already deranged, much less shooting Reagan over it.
Actually, Hinckley was not given a sentence at all and he didn’t cop a plea. He was found “not guilty by reason of insanity” by a jury. He was then placed in a mental institution not because he was found guilty of a crime but because he was mentally ill.
So the question is whether or not he is still mentally ill. I am certainly not a professional nor even particularly well-read on the subject. But I have read somewhere that personality disorders are hard to cure. (The linked article said that he was diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.)
His mother and a psychologist testified that he should have unsupervised visits. (His family lives three hours away.) A psychiatrist says that he is still showing signs of deception.
It seems to me that if he is cured, he should be released and if there is any doubt that he is cured, then his visits should be supervised.
Some of you are too young to remember Jodie Foster as she was over twenty years ago. Sassy little thing. I think she was fourteen when she made Taxi Driver in the mid-1970’s.
“Quite attractive” !?!
It’s like saying the sea’s “quite” wet…
I don’t know what it is about her though. It’s a special kind of magic that’s kept me lusting over her for 20-something years!
