I, like many people, am interested in the fate of Jared L. Loughner, who attempted to assassinate Gabrielle Giffords and succeeded in killing six others. Recently, a federal court deemed Loughner mentally incompetent to stand trial.
As a human-being, I’m of course appalled at the idea that this man shouldn’t receive some type of harsh justice. As an attorney, however, I know the unique problem of culpability/retribution/rehabilitation as applied to the mentally ill. When I worked at my law firm, I worked on a death penalty clemency petition in Virginia. I researched all of the granted and denied petitions in the country over the past few decades. When you look at the details of a number of these defendants, when you look at their IQ tests and behavior over time, you realize just how many mentally ill people we execute every year. I wrote a novel a few years back dealing with a mentally ill teenager who detonates a bomb in his school. The act and the consequences of the bombing for the town and victims were easy enough to write. My problem was with the perpetrator himself. Today, we talked about human need as the starting point of stories. The question is: when dealing with a mind corrupted to the point of psychosis, how do we avoid constructing a mere monster who only functions as a creator of obstacles?
