Hurting others is an act of insanity

Do we think James Holmes is innocent by reason of insanity for the Aurora Colorado mass killing? Absolutely.

When you look at the crime itself, and think about how much preparation this man did ahead of time, it is understandable that many people would think he is sane. It appears that a lot of coldhearted, rational, logical thinking went into the planning. It’s easy to conclude that Holmes must be some kind of evil monster, even “diabolical” and “demonic” to quote Governor Hickenlooper of Colorado from Sunday's Meet the Press.

But according to the thinking of this philosophy, no one in his or her right mind could ever commit such an act. It is impossible to be sane and do such a thing. In fact, any act that hurts another person is the result of delusional thinking, from a driver cutting someone off in traffic to a trader on Wall Street purposefully deceiving her customers to Jerry Sandusky molesting children. Hurting yourself or another is an indication of insanity.

The “moment of passion” is often used as an insanity defense in court: husband catches wife in bed with another man, kills both in a jealous rage, the jury is sympathetic, and the killer serves little or no jail time. First-degree murder, on the other hand, means malice aforethought—the crime was premeditated—and we throw the book or the death chamber at these people. But isn’t it obvious that the mafia hit man who kills for profit; the woman who slowly poisons her husband for the insurance money; the kidnapper or terrorist who painstakingly plans the job months ahead of time; or the James Holmes who orders ridiculous amounts of ammunition, buys body armor, and booby traps his apartment to serve as a diversion, is actually more insane than the individual who kills in a moment of sudden passion? These premeditating criminals exhibit a chronic state of dementia: they are able to consciously live with their crime-in-progress over an extended period, to plan well ahead of the actual execution of it.

Dr. James Gilligan, a psychiatrist who directed the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School and was in charge of psychiatric services for the Massachusetts state prison system for ten years, begins his book on violence with this message:

 The first lesson...is that all violence is an attempt to reach justice, or what the violent person perceives as justice, for himself or for whomever it is on whose behalf he is being violent, so as to receive whatever retribution or compensation the violent person feels is ‘due’ him or ‘owed’ to him, or to those on whose behalf he is acting, or so as to prevent those whom he loves or identifies with from being subjected to injustice. Thus, the attempt to achieve and maintain justice, or to undo or prevent injustice, is the one and only universal cause of violence. (italics in the original)

In other words, no matter how horrible an act of violence might be, the perpetrator believed he or she was doing the right thing—that’s how delusional a human can be.

One would be hard pressed to top the Nazi death camps for premeditated murder on a grand scale. Many people use them as an example of human evil. Actually, they’re just another example of insanity. Adolf Hitler believed he was acting in his country’s best interest. He believed he was restoring justice to Germany for the wrongs imposed after WWI, and that he was creating a better homeland. Clearly there were a lot of Germans who agreed with him. He was wrong, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that in his deranged mind-generated reality he thought he was right. Adolf Hitler was not evil, he was insane.

I don’t know what was in James Holmes’ mind in the months before this horrific act, but I am pretty confident that when we learn more about him this description of Dr. Gilligan’s will provide a context to better understand his motives.

Most people hate the idea of a killer “getting away” with his crime through the insanity plea, because they strongly feel the need for the perpetrator to be punished, and they hate the idea that the killer will “get off easy” even if that means life in a mental institution.

Yesterday the governor of Colorado also asked, “How are we not able to identify someone like this who's so deeply, deeply disturbed?” I was glad to hear him ask this, because maybe we as a society are starting to understand that only a disturbed individual could be capable of such acts, and that even though we want to hold them accountable for their actions we have to, at the same time, accept that they are deeply sick. Perhaps it’s time to consider building maximum-security mental hospitals.