Legality Limits

First let me say that I am so greatful not to have crim law this semester. Going into finals with one less class is temporary insanity, not full blown crazy. Speaking of crazy, if you follow the Supreme Court, they heard a case today about the use of the insanity defense in Arizona and whether the Arizona statute is unconstitutionaly stringent in its requirements for making out and insanity defense. The defendant in this case was a 17 year old who thought that everyone in his whole town had turned into aliens, including his parents, and he ended up shooting a cop thinking he was one such alien. Sounds pretty crazy, but the catch is that for the defense to work you have to be so insane as to not to intend to do what you do, which is to not intend to kill. This kid knew what he was doing and intended to kill, but what he intended to kill was aliens. Here are the questions the supreme court was considering today:


05-5966 CLARK V. ARIZONA
DECISION BELOW: UNPUBLISHED
LOWER COURT CASE NUMBER: 1 CA-CR 03-0851; 1 CA 03-0985
QUESTIONS PRESENTED FOR REVIEW
(1) Whether Arizona's insanity law, as set forth in A.R.S. § 13-502 (1996)
and applied in this case, violated Petitioner's right to due process
under the United States Constitution, Fourteenth Amendment?
(2) Whether Arizona's blanket exclusion of evidence and refusal to
consider mental disease or defect to rebut the state's evidence on the
element of mens rea violated Petitioner's right to due process under
the United States Constitution, Fourteenth Amendment?
Cert. Granted 12/5/05

The reason this case caught my eye is that this is exactly the kind of stuff we learned about in our Crim law class. Our professor was not well loved, and it is pretty well agreed that we are going to all have to learn crim. law on our own in order to pass the bar. This is evidenced by the fact that although all 1000 pages of the casebook were assigned and supposidly covered during the semester, we spend most of the two-hour long, twice-a-week lectures talking about legality limits or listening to some story or another by our professor about cases he worked on or perps he met along the way. These stories, although not relevant to the exam he wrote, were usually entertaining and informative from a been-around-the-block kind of way, and they will probably stick around a lot longer in my mind than a memorized definition from the Model Penal Code. The same goes for the ideas behind analyzing legality limits. Other sections squacked when we told them what we were learning, but when I hear about a case like this, I realize that he left us with some analytical tools that are not only relevant but are very helpful. These are the kind of cases that get to the very essence of how we percieve punishment in America, and although I will be cursing my crim law prof come bar review time, in the long run, I am appreciative for his emphasis on understanding Due Process and Legality Limits. It is this kind of knowledge that makes one realize what one is learning at law school, that one can understand with greater subtlety a complex legal question that strikes at the heart of an issue relevant to our basic assumptions about governance, justice, humanity, and well, insanity.