Abstract
Kahler v. Kansas, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on March 23, 2020, ruled that the Due Process Clause does not require Kansas to adopt an insanity test that aims to understand a defendant’s ability to recognize that their crime was morally wrong. The Court claimed that the Kansas law at issue is valid because, while it does make moral incapacity irrelevant, it still permits mental illness as a defense to culpability if it prevents a defendant from forming the criminal intent required for the crime. However, this questioning and interpretation of the law insufficiently address a decades-long issue of lack of uniformity. There has yet to be a single version of the insanity defense that has been implemented in American law which allows states to retain the authority to define the relationship between criminal actions and mental illness. I argue that this lack of uniformity causes inconsistencies within the legal field that are detrimental to the current criminal justice system.
Historical Context
The insanity defense refers to a defense primarily used in criminal prosecutions based on the assumption that at the time of the crime, the defendant was suffering from severe mental illness that inhibited their ability to understand the nature of the crime. The defendant has the burden of proving that their mental illness affected how they differentiate right from wrong behavior not to be held legally accountable for the crime. Opinions of the insanity defense constantly fluctuated over the last century but recently have leaned more conservative due to concerns of it being misused. The majority of U.S. jurisdictions adopted the M’Naghten rule for insanity by 1950, which acquitted defendants who did not know the nature and wrongfulness of the crime by reason of mental disease or defect. In the 1950s, the American Law Institute (ALI) proposed a new two-pronged test, since the establishment of the M’Naghten rule in 1843, requiring a defendant to lack either the “substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality of his conduct” or the ability to “conform his conduct to the law” in order to be found insane. This new test is a more liberal interpretation of how defendants can prove their insanity as opposed to the M’Naghten rule. Many states began utilizing the ALI in replace of M’Naghten until the case of John Hinckley Jr., who was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1982 for his assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. This caused a massive uproar that pushed against the insanity defense, which catalyzed the U.S. Congress to enact the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984. The act provided the verdict of “guilty but mentally ill” which assures that a person can be found guilty but receive mental health treatment during the term of their sentence. Many state legislatures retained a more conservative M’Naghten standard, raising the standard of proof required and shifting the burden of proof to the defendant, while some states eliminated the original insanity defense altogether.
Kahler v. Kansas
In the case of Kahler v. Kansas, there are important questions regarding the insanity defense raised. James Kahler’s marriage with Karen Kahler began to deteriorate in 2008 after she began a sexual affair with another woman. She filed for divorce in January 2009 and moved out of their home with their two teenage daughters and 9-year-old son. In the following months, James Kahler became progressively distressed; he lost his job and was arrested for the alleged battery of Karen. Later that year on Thanksgiving weekend, he drove to the home of Karen’s grandmother, where he knew the family was staying, and murdered Karen, her grandmother, and both of his daughters while letting his son flee. He surrendered to the police the next day and was charged with capital murder.
In 1995, Kansas enacted what is now K.S.A. 21-5209, known as the mens rea approach. This approach essentially claims that defendants can only be acquitted by mental disease or defect if they can prove that they did not form the mens rea, criminal intent, for a crime as a result of mental illness. Prior to the trial, James Kahler filed a motion arguing that Kansas’s interpretation of the insanity defense violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. He argued that the mens rea approach violates due process because it focuses on a defendant’s intent instead of moral culpability. Instead, he argued, due process should require the availability of a legal mechanism that excuses defendants for their crimes when they lack moral culpability due to mental illness, specifically the right-and-wrong test for insanity. When the jury decided to impose the death penalty, Kahler appealed again only to be rejected by the Kansas Supreme Court based on earlier precedential decisions.
Proposal Based on Precedent
As evident from the history of the insanity defense, there has been a lot of discourse on how best to interpret the insanity defense. We see in Kahler v. Kansas that some states do not recognize a moral incapacity defense while some states have a variety of modified insanity defenses ranging from the M’Naghten and ALI Model Penal Code rules even to the abolition of the insanity defense. The ruling in Kahler v. Kansas was also based on the fact that there has yet to be a singular “fundamental” rule of the insanity defense to conclude the validity of Kahler’s claims. I propose that the United States needs to establish a single version of the insanity defense that is confirmed in law as to be “fundamental.”
I see some validity in Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent; he argued that Kansas’ mens rea approach is a violation of due process because mental illness does not deprive someone of the ability to form intent but rather influences the person’s “motivations for forming such intent.” However, I would argue that it is possible that mental illness can impact both factors: the ability to form intent and motivation for intent.
In a United Kingdom 1957 case of R v. Kemp, the defendant, who was of previous good character, attacked his wife with a hammer and was charged with causing grievous bodily harm. Medical proof showed that he suffered from hardening of arteries which led to a congestion of blood in the brain, causing a temporary lack of consciousness when he picked up the hammer. This hardening of the arteries was interpreted as a “disease of the mind” based on the M’Naghten Rule, meaning the defendant was unable to utilize automatism as a defense. The court claimed that this defect may be an important matter medically but had no relation to the law and he was found guilty but insane. Although this is a case that occurred in the United Kingdom, it showcases how a defendant can have a medical defect that affects the mind, consequently disturbing a person’s ability to form rational intent.
In the United States, a Texas jury found a former nurse Andrea Yates insane when she drowned her five children and the panel acquitted her of capital murder. She successfully pleaded insanity; her psychiatric history showed a high rate of recurrence of postpartum depression. After her fourth son in February 1999, Yates expressed symptoms of depression and claimed that she knew through a “feeling” that Satan wanted her to kill her children. In June 1999, she attempted to take her own life to stop herself from harming her children. She had multiple psychiatric hospitalizations after her suicidal attempts and major depressive episodes due to her anxieties about being an insufficient mother. Her schizophrenia translated to her speaking very little, rarely eating or drinking, and hallucinations that there were television cameras placed in her room to monitor the quality of her mothering. Further, she was convinced that Satan was within her and refused to discuss her unease with family members because she believed Satan would utilize this information against her. In this case, we see Yates’s mental illness affecting her motivation to kill; her schizophrenia forced her to believe that it was to save her children from Satan.
These preceding cases are all instances that prove there needs to be a continuity of the two-prong insanity defense that includes tests determining how mental illness affects the ability to form intent and the motivations to commit the act. By not having a “fundamental” insanity defense, there are major discrepancies between states on how the mentally ill are treated in the eyes of the court.
Conclusion Regardless of the validity behind James Kahler’s mental illness, his case raised a significant question on a core issue of the insanity defense. It is key to acknowledge that there are prevalent mental illnesses that pervade people’s actions and creating a status quo for how the law determines these crimes is vital. Further, we must keep in mind that simply providing more concrete ways for the mentally ill to be determined does not mean that this option will be abused. The insanity defense is only used in about one percent of all court cases and it is successful in about 26% of those cases. The relationship between psychiatry and the law has a lot of flux and controversy but having this conversation works to stabilize the legal field by even a small fraction.