Alaska may abandon criminal verdict behind longer sentences for mentally ill

On 5 June 1990, the office of the Alaska state troopers in Fairbanks received a call from a man saying: “We have a stiff on our hands.” When the police arrived at the residence, they were met by John Monroe, a schizophrenic man with a history of delusions, and blood on his hands and shirt. Monroe led them to the body of his father, who had been stabbed to death.

Monroe was charged with murder. David Sperbeck, the Alaska state psychiatrist who examined Monroe’s mental health at trial, noted that he suffered from “one of the most severe cases of schizophrenia that I’ve ever seen”, adding that on the day of the killing, Monroe had not taken the proper dosage of medication in five weeks and that he was probably suffering from psychotic delusions. Sperbeck testified that as a result of this mental state, Monroe did not understand that what he was doing was wrong, nor would he have been capable of stopping himself from killing his father.

And yet Monroe was not acquitted on grounds of insanity. In April 1991, the court found Monroe “guilty but mentally ill” of second-degree murder, and the judge sentenced him to 60 years’ imprisonment without the possibility of parole – a longer prison term than a sane person convicted of the same crime would have received.

Monroe’s harsh punishment is mandated by criminal justice reforms that Alaska implemented in 1982. After John Hinckley Jr was found not guilty by reason of insanity of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, many states rushed to limit the insanity defense – but Alaska’s reforms were the most severe.

The state made it nearly impossible to invoke the not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) verdict. And it created the new “guilty but mentally ill” (GBMI) verdict, which is even harsher than a regular guilty verdict, for defendants who, like Monroe, are actually less culpable by reason of their mental disability, and who previously would have been acquitted and sent to a mental institution for treatment.

“Guilty but mentally ill” inmates are not eligible for parole, which means that they are condemned to serve sentences of up to three times longer than “sane” defendants found guilty of the same crime – in a prison setting likely to only worsen their illness. The upshot of the 1982 reforms has actually been to deter defendants from even raising the issue of mental illness at trial, so that even as the Alaska courts have handed down few GBMI verdicts over the years, severely mentally ill offenders have also been denied the chance at acquittal and treatment.

It is for these reasons that, for the first time since Alaska implemented its insanity defense reforms, the state is considering junking the GBMI verdict.

“From the point of view of a rational criminal code, [GBMI] makes no sense,” says Stephen Morse, a professor of psychology and law in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

For one, people who don’t deserve to be punished should not be punished, says Lawrence Fitch, who teaches mental health law at the University of Maryland Law School: “If the person meets standards for an insanity defense – did not understand what he or she was doing was wrongful and, thus, is morally blameless – putting the person in prison ... violates principles of a just society.”

Violent, severely mentally ill people like Monroe should instead be placed in psychiatric facilities until they are no longer dangerous, says Josie Garton, an assistant public defender in Anchorage. Sperbeck says that even though GBMI patients will receive treatment in prison, their mental illness can be exacerbated by the social and physical isolation, and prison policies like strip searches and cell transfers.

Mentally ill criminals are also more capable of reform than others because their crime stems from treatable illness, says Christopher Slobogin, a professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt Law School. “If anything,” Slobogin adds, “people found GBMI should be more likely to get parole.”

That pertains to offenders convicted of crimes as serious as murder, such as Monroe. If Monroe – who killed his father at age 28 – had been found straight guilty instead of GBMI, he would have received mandatory parole at age 68. Under the GBMI statute, he will remain in prison until he is 88, if he does not die before then.

James Fayette, an assistant district attorney in Anchorage, argues that since it’s up to the judge to tailor sentencing to the individual defendant, it’s not automatic that an inmate with a GBMI verdict will receive the exact same sentence as a regular guilty person.

But Slobogin says that Alaska’s GBMI statute is “probably unconstitutional”. The authors of a 2010 Georgetown Law Review article on insanity laws in Alaska argue that the statutes violate both the due process clause of the14th amendment and the eighth amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

By some estimates, there have only been a small number of GBMI verdicts. But advocates say that’s because the law is so unfriendly to mentally ill defendants that lawyers rarely raise the issue during their trials, according to a recent University of Nevada, Las Vegas report.

Insanity acquittals are exceedingly rare. As the court in one high-profile GBMI case noted when it handed down its verdict, the state’s mental health requirement essentially abolishes the insanity defense. Only two defendants in Alaska have been found not guilty by reason of insanity since 1982.

“Defendants who may have a meritorious mental health defense do not pursue the defense because the likely outcome is more punitive than a guilty verdict,” Garton says.

Some of those defendants already serving GMBI sentences have seen sharp deterioration in their mental health.

In 2007, Cynthia Lord was found GBMI on three counts of first-degree murder after she said a supernatural force known as “Evil” instructed her to kill her three sons, who she believed had turned into robots.

When Sperbeck evaluated her a few years ago at the the Hiland Mountain correctional facility, he noted that life in prison was worsening her schizophrenia.

“When [schizophrenic patients] are alone with their delusional thoughts, these thoughts are often cultivated, ultimately resulting in reality distortion and a magnification of the intensity of the thought disorder,” he wrote in a 2013 affidavit. “Being alone is particularly devastating for individuals such as Cynthia Lord.”