Trials: Two States of Mind

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When is insanity not insanity? It depends partly on the case, but importantly, too, on the state that it is heard in and the state of mind of the jurors it is presented to. Last week insanity pleas in New York and Arizona had widely differing results:

>In Brooklyn, in the country's first so-called LSD murder trial, former Medical Student Stephen Kessler was accused of having stabbed his mother-in-law 105 times. Kessler was asked to leave Downstate Medical School in 1964 because his behavior was noted to be unstable. He has admitted that he used LSD in an attempt to establish that schizophrenia has chemical origins, but in the process, he took a couple of bad trips. In one, "a chair appeared to turn into blood"; after another, he had to be hospitalized for five days, and he remembered nothing of what had happened. Though he did not claim to be on LSD at the time his mother-in-law was murdered, he did say that he had taken a barbiturate and could not remember anything for a 1½-day period. The prosecution introduced witnesses who heard him say he was on LSD around the time of the crime. In his charge, the judge reminded the jury that "voluntary intoxication by alcohol or drugs" is no defense. The jury nonetheless found him not guilty by reason of insanity. A series of psychiatric tests will now determine whether or not he is currently sane enough to go free.

>In Phoenix, despite a plea of insanity, Accused Mass Murderer Robert Benjamin Smith, 19, was found guilty and now faces the gas chamber. Smith is the high school student who shot to death four women and a child in a Mesa, Ariz., beauty parlor, after getting them to lie down, heads to the center, like spokes of a wheel (TIME, Nov. 18). When police arrived only moments after the killings, Smith announced laconically: "I wanted to get known, just wanted to get myself a name." Defense psychiatrists testified that Smith could not have known right from wrong. "For him," said one, "it was like running across an old kitchen clock that is still ticking and breaking it." The prosecution pointed out that he had brought gloves and made other preparations which indicated he well knew that what he was doing was wrong. There were also four notes Smith had written to a fellow inmate while awaiting trial. "My attorney is making everyone think that I'm completely insane," said part of one, and in another he wrote that to beat the rap, "I'm trying for that hospital." Though defense experts testified that it was not unusual for an insane man to think he was not, the jury took less than two hours to bring in the guilty verdict.