Another Look at Hinckley

THE AFTERNOON of March 30, 1981 forced unforgettable television images on a nation unaccustomed to dramas more serious than General Hospital. White house press Secretary James Brady, gravely wounded, bleeding into a sidewalk grating in front of the Capitol Hilton. A stunned Ronald Reagan, unaware of his own serious wound, being shoved into his limousine as bullets zipped past him. A secret serviceman, brandishing a submachine gun, yelling wildly at crowds to keep back while his colleagues wrestled with the President's assailant. Another aide running through the midst of the panic, clutching a briefcase later identified as the presidential "black box"-controls for a potential national defense crisis. "

Those watching CBS that Monday afternoon remember another image. While the screens showed a deserted Moscow street in the early morning. Walter Cronkite-in the U.S.S.R. preparing a special documentary-lectured on the meaning of America's latest assassination scare. What, Cronkite asked rhetorically, would the Russians think of America when they arose and heard of the events outside the Capitol Hilton? America would again seem to be cascading out of control. The political violence endemic to our democracy since 1963 would seem by implication to justify the domestic repressive measures of the Soviet Union, where political violence from the populace has been nearly non-existent.

A federal court's finding last week that John Warnock Hinckley Jr. was not gurity by reason of insanity of gunning down the president and three other 16 months ago must kindle the same questions. Imagine what the Soviets must think of us in the wake of the Hinckley acquittal. The same society that unceasingly berates them for external aggression itself refuses to punish a crime-attempted murder of the President-that almost anywhere else would be grounds for invocation of the death penalty.

For that matter, imagine how to prosecutors must feel. Their legal careers will probably be crippled by a failure to convict a man whose smoking gun was repeatedly displayed on all three networks and on the front page of every newspaper in the country. America must again seem out of control, its priorities skewed way out proportion. How else would 12 men and women get the idea they were dispensing "justice" by treating America's latest villian with kid gloves?

That's one way looking at the Hinckley verdict.

The other way is to forget entirely about how the outside world is reacting. The Hinckley jury plainly did that. Unlike many celebrated murder trials, a not-guilty finding appealed to no constituency. There were none of the Southern racists who might have applauded the acquittal of James Earl Ray, none of the Rhode Island jet setters who would have loved to see Claus von Bulow go free.

People will shake their heads at the Hinckley jurors for the rest of their days. Except for the probable cheers of the American Civil Liberties Union, the dozen men and women who freed John Hinckley after four days of deliberations made no friends by pardoning his sins.

But once one abandons the initial shock at the unexpected decision the insanity defense of Hinckley's lawyers and psychiatrists seems well grounded in the Anglo-American justice tradition. That tradition punishes people for two reasons for crimes they knew they were committing, and for having had free will over the decision to commit the crime.

By finding insanity as in last week's case a jury implicitly argues at least one of those key reasons is absent. The truly insane may be unaware they are committing a capital offense. More frequently their disturbed mental conditions leave them with no apparent control over their actions. Whether John Hinckley was sufficiently mad as not to know or control what he did last March 30 is for experts to assess and for juries to decide, advised by those specialists in how people's minds work.

The Hickley decision may or may not have been correct: only those well-versed in the nuances of human will can begin to guess. One thing is sure, however, political conservatives will use the unpopular not guilty verdict to back up their calls for tougher criminal justice policies, to roll back the procedural guarantees of the accused enshrined during the last quarter-century and now under attack anew in Congress.

On Philadelphia radio the night of the Hinckley decision, an angry young "man in the street" was quoted as saying of the verdict: "...Yeah, and now [H.R.] Haldeman [a Nixon White House aide] is gonna be able to get a pardon by saying he committed Watergate for Jody Foster," Such analogies will be the Right's main ammunition in trying to use last week's decision to weaken controversial court practices that and defendants, like the exclusionary rule, which prohibits the use of illegally seized evidence in a trial. In defense of those liberal practices, it's worth observing two things.

The first is that contrary to what Sen. Orrin Hatch (R. -Utah) and his conservative colleagues will insist, the Hinckley verdict is not an expansion of the rights of the accused. It is novel only because the insanity defense has never worked in such a widely publicized case. The verdict, however, only reaffirms the prior knowledge free will foundation of American law. John Hinckley's inevitable consignment to a mental home does not eliminate the distinction between legal treatment of the "loons" and the "goons." Only several weeks ago, convicted assassin Sirhan B. Sirham, the murderer of Robert F. Kennedy, was denied parole in California, testimony to the fact that it was the very calculated and willful nature of his offense that made it so abhorrent.

The second observation is that any forced analogies the Right will make-like that of Hinckley to Haldeman-are preposterous. Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon offended us because Nixon evaded liability for his action by using his contacts within government, when a friendless outsider, a loser like Hinckley, is let off there is, at least, no collusion to abhor. Whether the jury last week correctly deemed Hinckley insane will always be a judgement call. But the fact that he could win his reprieve from a system whose participants were predisposed against him seems worth applauding for a moment-no matter what the outside world thinks.