Was Hinckley treated fairly?

Our view: Release of Ronald Reagan’s shooter from D.C. hospital raises difficult questions about mental illness and unequal justice

One of the more frightening human rights violations of the former Soviet Union was its practice of locking up political prisoners in psychiatric facilities. Such “punitive medicine” was practiced under Joseph Stalin’s regime and continued through Leonid Brezhnev’s days as general secretary. Psychiatry provided the various regimes a convenient way to hold people against their will for as long as the state deemed appropriate.

Such human rights abuses would seem unthinkable in the United States, yet the government’s handling of John W. Hinckley Jr. raises serious questions about whether the man who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981 has been treated like a criminal defendant, a mentally ill patient or a political prisoner. As early as Aug. 5, the 61-year-old is scheduled to be released from St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., the federally owned psychiatric facility where he has spent most of the last 35 years, his freedom made possible by an order issued Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman.

Many Americans know of that terrible day when Hinckley, psychotic and depressed, shot at President Reagan and his entourage outside a Hilton Hotel in Washington, not only wounding the president but severely injuring James Brady as well as wounding Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and Thomas Delahanty, a D.C. police officer. He nursed a delusion that, like the main character in the movie, “Taxi Driver,” he would somehow impress actress Jodie Foster, who had played the role of a teen prostitute in the film.

But what many don’t recall so readily is what happened next. Mr. Hinckley was tried and found not guilty by reason of insanity. Whether that was the proper verdict is an open question. It outraged many Americans and led to reforms in federal and local laws governing the insanity plea. Had Mr. Hinckley been tried under contemporary standards, he would likely have ended up in prison. But he wasn’t. He was judged not guilty.

Thus, under the law, Mr. Hinckley has never been a prisoner nor should he have been punished. The not-guilty verdict meant he would be housed and treated at an appropriate medical facility until he was judged to no longer be a danger to himself or to others. That’s it. Theoretically, that strictly medical standard has been the only thing keeping him at St. Elizabeths since the day the verdict was rendered in June of 1982.

So the question remains, has Mr. Hinckley been treated fairly under those terms? Doctors have certainly judged him to no longer be the psychotic and obsessed celebrity stalker he was in 1981. He’s been allowed out of St. Elizabeth’s hundreds of times over the years, and since 2003, he’s been granted unsupervised trips to be with his family in Williamsburg, Va., where his elderly mother still lives.

Considering that the average inpatient hospital stay for someone who is found not guilty by reason of insanity is on the order of seven years and Mr. Hinckley has now been shuttered in St. Elizabeths for five times that long — with federal prosecutors in Democratic and Republican administrations alike consistently objecting whenever medical experts recommend release — it’s fair to question whether there’s been unequal treatment here.

It’s also safe to assume that many Americans simply won’t care that the government may have used a psychiatric hospital as a prison or at least the means to offset what many might have viewed as an unfair verdict in the original case. It’s highly unlikely, for example, that Mr. Hinckley’s medical record was taken into account when Donald Trump observed at a news conference Wednesday, “And by the way, David [sic] Hinckley should not have been freed, OK?”

Still, there is a much more fundamental question here that can easily be overlooked by the emotional punch of a famous assassin going free: Do the ends justify the means when it involves potentially stretching (or at least unequally applying) a medical standard to keep someone under lock and key for as long as possible? That doesn’t make the U.S. the Soviet Union, where simply criticizing the government could have gotten a dissident thrown in an insane asylum, but it’s perhaps not as far apart as we would like to think.