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alp227

(31,961 posts)
Sun Jul 22, 2012, 06:45 PM Jul 2012

Supreme Court is asked to find that insanity defense is a constitutional right

Robert Barnes, Washington Post Supreme Court correspondent, 7/23/2012

There’s no doubt John Joseph Delling knew what he was doing. His carefully planned 2007 crime spree lasted weeks, covered 6,500 miles and culminated in two people dead and one seriously wounded.

He had his reasons, too. Delling, then 21, had become “a type of Jesus,” he later explained, and the men he attacked, two of them former classmates he had not seen in years, were stealing his “energy.” An MRI of his brain would have revealed the damage the men had already caused, he told authorities.

“I had to defend myself,” he said.

As the nation confronts another act of unfathomable madness, Delling’s story is one chapter in a distressing and violent genre: the loner who tries to impress a movie star by shooting the president; the mother who drowns her children to save them from damnation; the black-clad shooter who seems to step from the movie screen to kill.

full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-is-asked-to-find-that-insanity-defense-is-a-constitutional-right/2012/07/22/gJQAKNbr2W_singlePage.html

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