Chapter 13

1. The Massachusetts state legislature appointed a commission to investigate which claims?

2. What were some of the accomplishments of Dorothea Dix?

3. Who were two most influential individuals during the second-wave reform of mental illness, and what did they contribute?

4. What was the purpose of deinstitutionalization policies?

Chapter 14

1. What are gender-responsive practices?

2. What is the gendered pathways perspective?

3. What are the arguments for gender-specific policies?

4. What are the goals of prison classification systems?

Chapter 15

1. Restorative justice takes what kind of approach?

2. What are some of the significant reforms achieved by the victim’s rights movements? Name at least two.

3. In terms of responsibility, what are the differences between the restorative process model and the due process model?

4. What is the purpose of using victim impact panels?

Chapter 16

1. What are the premises of the Three Strikes laws?

2. What did the second strike provision of the Three Strikes law in California require?

3. What are wobbler offenses?

4. What are the two forms of discretion that can be used by prosecutors when dealing with an offender who has strikes?

Criminal Justice Responses to the Mentally Ill

Henry F. Fradella

Rebecca Smith-Casey

Mentally ill criminal offenders often attract substantial attention from a broad cross section of society, particularly in the media. One of the most famous cases in history involving a mentally ill offender is the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley Jr. Hinckley, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1982 and since that time remains under institutional care at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC. It does not take an assassination attempt on a U.S. President, however, for the media to devote significant attention to the crimes committed by mentally ill offenders, or those presumed to be. Consider the following recent cases:

Just before Christmas of 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza committed the most deadly school shooting spree in U.S. history. Armed with three of his mother’s guns, he killed 20 children and 6 adults inside an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, before turning a gun on himself. Details about his mental status remain fuzzy, but news reports suggested that Lanza committed these acts after learning his mother was preparing to commit him to a psychiatric facility. But, much of what was reported in the news was either hearsay or conjecture. As of this writing, the fact is that it is not yet known whether Lanza had a history of psychiatric illness or if he had been exhibiting signs of a psychotic breakdown. Yet, reports of Lanza’s purported mental status filled speculative media accounts of his heinous crime.

In the summer of 2012, James Holmes killed 12 people and wounded 58 others inside an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. As of this writing, his case is pending, but his defense attorneys represented to the court that Holmes was mentally ill at the time of the shooting massacre and, therefore, they intend to litigate an insanity defense. In fact, before Holmes dropped out of a PhD program in neuroscience at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz campus, he sought mental health assistance from professionals associated with the university’s mental health services. Details of Holmes’s mental status have not yet been made public, but any mental illnesses revealed are likely to play a central role in his defense. Moreover, there will surely be significant questions about the civil liability of the university employed mental health professionals for their actions (or inactions) after meeting with Holmes and assessing his potential dangerousness.

In 2011, Jared Loughner opened fire on a crowd of people in a Tucson, Arizona, shopping center parking lot. The shooting killed six people, including a federal judge, and injured 13 others, including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, whose treatment was followed intently by the media up until her resignation from her congressional seat in 2012. Loughner had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He spent more than a year and a half in a secure mental hospital where mental health professionals worked to restore his competency to stand trial. In August 2012, a federal judge found that his competency was restored through treatment and then accepted Loughner’s guilty plea. He was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

In April 2007, Seung Hoi Cho, who had been treated over a period of time for a variety of psychiatric symptoms, embarked on a shooting spree at Virginia Tech University, killing 32 people and injuring dozens more. At various times in his life, Cho had been diagnosed with major depression, social anxiety disorder, selective mutism, and an otherwise unspecified mood disorder.