According to Associated Press news articles, “A JetBlue Airways captain accused of disrupting a flight when he left the cockpit screaming about religion and terrorists plans to use an insanity defense at trial. An attorney for Clayton F. Osbon filed a motion Wednesday [April 18, 2012]Â outlining plans to argue Osbon was insane at the time of the incident on the March 27 flight from New York to Las Vegas. Osbon remains jailed in Texas awaiting a court-ordered psychiatric exam to determine his competency for trial and whether he was legally sane when witnesses say he left the cockpit and ran screaming through the plane’s cabin.”
I’ll be the first to admit to having had the rare meltdown; but I have since taken some responsibility for my behavior and this has not happened in a very long time, thank you very much. I can empathize, however.
Supporters of CCHR understand also that psychiatric drugs can actually cause this kind of psychotic behavior. That is not, however, the subject of this newsletter. We are going to discuss the insanity defense.
Dr. Thomas Szasz had the following to say about the insanity defense [from Ideas on Liberty, 50: 31?32 (March), 2000]:
“The insanity defense, as we know it, is a relatively new cultural invention. … The ‘crime’ that led to the creation of the insanity defense was not murder, but a deed long considered even more heinous, namely, self-murder or suicide, punished by both ecclesiastic and secular penalties: the suicide was denied religious burial and his estate was forfeited to the Crown’s Almoner. Because punishing suicide required doing grave harm to innocent parties — that is, to the suicide’s children and spouse — men sitting on coroner’s juries eventually found the task to be a burden they were unwilling to bear. However, prevailing religious beliefs precluded repealing the laws punishing the crime. The law now came to the rescue of the would-be punishers, offering them the option of finding the self-killer non compos mentis and hence not responsible for his deed. In the eighteenth century, it became a matter of routine for juries to arrive at the posthumous diagnosis that the suicide was insane at the moment he killed himself. (The criminal law against suicide was repealed only in the nineteenth century, by which time it had been replaced by mental health laws.) … By validating the fiction that suicides could, post facto, be found to have been non compos mentis, the law had crafted a mechanism for rejecting responsibility — the criminal’s for his deed, the jury’s for its duty — and, aided by the medical profession, wrapped the deception and self-deception in the mantle of healing and science.”
How is it that today we still face the absurd situation of psychiatrists testifying to excuse a wrongdoers’ actions? The answer lies in three places: 1) because psychiatric “experts” are paid an average of $3,600 (in the U.S.) per day to testify for whomever is willing to foot the bill; 2) the goal for psychiatry that was delineated by G. Brock Chisholm, co-founder of the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH), that therapy be aimed at eliminating the concept of right and wrong; and 3) bolstering this, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Psychiatry’s attempt to eradicate the concept of right and wrong and thereby destroy personal responsibility by inventing excuses for the most flagrant misconduct, undermines the justice system and must be corrected.
In 2006 the United States Supreme Court upheld the right of the state of Arizona to make laws which excluded many forms of psychiatric testimony in criminal cases. In concluding that the Arizona statute was sufficient to satisfy a criminal defendants’ rights to a fair trial, the Supreme Court quoted a legal source in support of its decision, stating, “No matter how the test for insanity is phrased, a psychiatrist or psychologist is no more qualified than any other person to give an opinion about whether a particular defendant’s mental condition satisfies the legal test for insanity.â€
It must be recognized that every person is responsible for his or her own actions and must be held accountable for their actions. State legislators should repeal any laws permitting the insanity defense and diminished capacity pleas. Write your legislators and tell them what you think.