Add this to the details that make the prosecution of Aurora movie theater shooter so unique: Almost nobody in Colorado pleads insanity.
According to new numbers provided by the Colorado Judicial Branch, defendants entered insanity pleas in only nine-hundredths of a percent of all felony cases between 2001 and 2011. That’s 0.09%, or 9 times out of every 10,000 cases. And it is way less than studies have shown the insanity plea is used in other states.
For instance, a study of insanity pleas in eights states done in 1991 found the plea was used in between 5.7% and 0.3% of all felony indictments in those states. (One of the limitations of assessing the insanity plea, I’ve been told, is that there has been almost no research on its frequency or success rates in the last 20 years.) It is commonly said that the insanity plea occurs in about 1 percent of all cases.
Colorado’s success rate for insanity pleas across all cases where the plea is entered — about 28 percent of the time — is more in line with the national average.
So, too, is Colorado’s rate for insanity pleas in first-degree murder cases, like the Aurora theater shooting. Between 2001 and 2011, 39 of the 1,022 defendants charged with first-degree murder after deliberation pleaded insanity, according to the state numbers. That’s a rate of 3.8 percent. In about a third of those cases, the defendant was eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity, though, as we reported earlier this month, juries almost never deliver insanity verdicts in murder cases in Colorado.
One reason why insanity pleas are relatively more common in murder cases is because of the consequences of being successful, said Henry Steadman, the president of the think tank Policy Research Associates and an expert on mental health and the criminal justice system.
Conviction on relatively minor charges brings correspondingly relatively minor penalties. A burglar who is found guilty, for instance, might receive only a minimal prison sentence. But if that same burglar were to plead insanity and then be found insane, he would be committed to a mental health institution for however long it takes to get better, Steadman said. That means the hypothetical burglar could spend years or even decades more in confinement for winning an insanity defense than for losing one.
(Interestingly, however, 14 people charged with second-degree burglary of a dwelling have pleaded insanity since 2000, making it one of the more popular charges to which defendants plead insanity, according to state figures. The plea has only a 21 percent success rate in such cases.)
“If it’s a relatively light felony case, it would be malfeasance if the attorney raised an insanity defense,” Steadman said.
The same is not true in murder cases, where the potential punishment includes life in prison or, as in the case of Aurora theater shooter James Holmes, death. That is why murder cases make up a disproportionate number of insanity pleas, both in Colorado and nationally.
Between 2001 and 2011, first-degree murder after deliberation was filed as a charge in only about one quarter of 1 percent — 0.23% to be precise — of all felony cases in Colorado. However, insanity pleas to first-degree murder after deliberation made up about 10 percent of all insanity pleas during that same period, according to an analysis of the state figures.
A 1995 study published in the definitive Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law found a similar trend nationwide. Though murder cases make up only a small number of all felony cases, the study found that murder cases made up 14 percent of the cases in which insanity was pleaded as a defense.
“It probably makes more sense,” said New York Law School professor Michael Perlin, “to save the insanity defense for a more serious crime.”
Cases don’t come more serious than the Aurora theater shooting. And that perhaps explains as well as anything the insanity plea in the case, despite the long odds against it. For the defense attorneys, there really wasn’t anything to lose.
