Today is the first Monday in October, and the first case up on the SCOTUS docket is Kahler v. Kansas, in which the question is whether the Constitution allows states to abolish the insanity defense, as has been done in Kansas, Alaska, Idaho, Montana, and Utah.
My colleague Sarah O'Rourke Schrup, of Northwestern's Bluhm Legal Clinic, represents the petitioner, and will thus be the first attorney to argue a SCOTUS case this term.
Here is how the ABA Journal describes the case:
In the Kansas case, James Kraig Kahler was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2009 murders of his estranged wife, his two teenage daughters, and his wife’s grandmother.
Experts for the defense and the prosecution concluded that Kahler suffered from obsessive- compulsive personality disorder, major depressive disorder, and borderline, paranoid, and narcissistic personality tendencies.
The defense expert further concluded that Kahler’s depression at the time of the shooting was so severe that Kahler did not make a genuine choice to kill his family members. Kahler’s lawyers proposed jury instructions on both diminished capacity and insanity as an affirmative defense, but the trial court rejected them as prohibited by Kansas law.
The Kansas Legislature in 1995 adopted a “mens rea,” or mental state, approach to insanity. Under this approach, it is “a defense to a prosecution under any statute that the defendant, as a result of mental disease or defect, lacked the culpable mental state required as an element of the crime charged. Mental disease or defect is not otherwise a defense."
And here is how Prof. Schrup explained the appeal:
“This is recognizing what has been there all along—the capacity for moral judgment as a prerequisite for criminal culpability,” says Sarah O’Rourke Schrup, a clinical associate professor at Northwestern University law school and the director of the school’s Supreme Court Clinic.
“The mens rea approach removes this moral component,” says Schrup. “Why, for someone in Kansas and these other states, it is enough only if the person acts intentionally?”
According to the prosecution:
“Kansas has reasonably determined that individuals who voluntarily and intentionally kill another human being are culpable, even if they do not recognize their actions are morally wrong,” the state attorney general’s office says in its merits brief.
The American Bar Association has filed an amicus brief on behalf of the petitioner:
“The Kansas statute at issue in this case allows a defendant to be convicted of a crime and sentenced to death, even when his mental disorder prevented him from understanding that his actions were wrong,” the ABA brief says. “For nearly four decades, the ABA has consistently opposed state statutes that permit this result, given their incompatibility with the Anglo-American legal tradition and with commonly-accepted rationales for punishment.”
Good luck to Sarah at today's argument, at which she will also be the first lawyer to enjoy two minutes of uninterrupted argument before facing questions from the court.