Bipolar Illness and Crime: A Difficult Connection To Prove
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When a respected local historian and author admitted in court this spring that he had stolen letters written by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, his attorney disclosed that his client suffers from bipolar disorder, a condition he claimed clouded his judgment.
Edward Renehan Jr. was the director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association in Oyster Bay, Long Island, at the time of the thefts that occurred between January 2006 and October 2007. As more Americans are diagnosed with bipolar disorder, once known as manic depression, it is becoming a more common defense to claim it impairs judgement and leads people with no prior records, like Mr. Renehan, to commit crimes.
“The problem with using bipolar disorder as an insanity defense is that you can be extremely crazy but still not legally insane,” an attorney and talk show co-host, Ronald Kuby said, adding that bipolar disorder is a condition that affects mood rather than cognition. “Insanity is the mental state that excuses your conduct.”
Mr. Kuby added that while bipolar disorder is primarily a mood disorder dealing with crashing depression followed by manic energy, “the insanity defense focuses on cognition, and reckless behavior isn’t an insanity defense.”
Recent advances in treating psychiatric conditions have helped make bipolar disorder a well-known illness in the legal community. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 5.7 million American adults, or about 2.6% of the population age 18 and older, suffer from the illness in a given year.
“The diagnosis of bipolar has increased because of increased recognition by doctors and patients about the disorder,” an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Sanjay Mathew, said. “There are many more drugs to treat bipolar today, including all of the atypical antipsychotics like Risperdal and Zyprexa that were originally introduced for schizophrenia.”
While there are more cases of bipolar, there is a strict rule in New York State for an insanity-based defense that makes this argument hard to prove. Known as the McNaughton rule and derived from a case in Victorian England, it dictates a presumption of sanity unless the defense can prove that the defendant did not know what he was doing was wrong.
“Do you know someone who’s had a heart attack? It’s terrible for him to have a heart condition, but does it make him any less capable of consciously committing a crime? Of course not. Using bipolar disorder as a defense in a case is just not viable,” a defense attorney, Murray Richman, said. “It’s absolutely not a defense — it’s an excuse. It has nothing to do with a person’s ability to know right from wrong.”
There are some lawyers, however, who said that using the bipolar defense as part of a larger strategy can work well. According to Mr. Kuby, bipolar disorder can have so-called jury appeal if the sufferer has a long and well-documented history of aberrant behavior coupled with requests for institutional help.
“There’s the idea that he didn’t get the help he needed — there’s a diffusion of responsibility. A long history of bipolar disorder gives no sense that he’s faking mental illness to beat the rap,” he said.
Criminal defense attorney Arthur Aidala said that if a defendant has a well-documented case of bipolar disorder, then his lawyer can use it in an attempt to mitigate charges, especially in bringing a murder charge down to manslaughter.
“In the end, if you can show that instead of squeezing the trigger, the defendant truly thought he was squeezing a banana, then there exists the possibility of diminished capacity,” Mr. Aidala said.