Even as people are sent to jail for minor crimes, high-profile defendants appear to be set free due to technicalities in the law or to variants of the insanity defense. The average American, flooded with reports about the Menendez brothers, the Bobbitts, the trials resulting from the Los Angeles riots, as well as the guests on salacious talk shows, might well conclude that anyone can finagle his or her way to freedom with a sad story and slick attorneys. That analysis is only partially true, reports Stephanie B. Goldberg in the June ABA Journal. Not many defendants use variations of the insanity defense, and three states have abolished insanity defenses entirely. But the requirement that battered women prove that they were in imminent danger of harm before they maimed or killed their husbands limits this defense.
More esoteric defenses are less successful.
Post-traumatic stress syndrome is recognized by some courts, though, and isn't just a defense for troubled Vietnam vets anymore. But in a 1993 study by the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, only 28 out of 8,163 defendants surveyed who had tried to claim insanity said they were suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, and those defendants were no more successful in getting off by convincing the courts that they were insane than other defendants who used more common defenses. What may be true is that juries are less reliable and impartial than they used to be. In the July Washington Monthly , Daniel Franklin, in a review of Stephen J. Adler's The Jury , cites some alarming trends about the decline of juries. Well-educated people can usually exempt themselves from jury service nowadays.