Morse on Before and After Hinckley: Legal Insanity in the United States @pennlaw

Stephen Morse, University of Pennsylvania Law School, is publishing Before and After Hinckley: Legal Insanity in the United States in The Insanity Defense: International and Comparative Perspectives (Ronnie Mackay & Warren Brookbanks, eds., Oxford, 2022). Here is the abstract.

This chapter first considers the direction of the affirmative defense of legal insanity in the United States before John Hinckley was acquitted by reason of insanity in 1982 for attempting to assassinate President Reagan and others and the immediate aftermath of that acquittal. Since the middle of the 20th Century, the tale is one of the rise and fall of the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code test for legal insanity. Then it turns to the constitutional decisions of the United States Supreme Court concerning the status of legal insanity. Finally, it addresses the substantive and procedural changes that have occurred in the insanity defense since the wave of legal changes following the Hinckley decision.

Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.