Juries Weighing Sanity Often Find Choice Anguishing

The jury reached a verdict after three days of mental wrestling, but Helen Boggs left the Santa Ana courthouse more confused than ever.

She and her colleagues had concluded in February that Isidro Hernandez was sane when he slammed his car into a bicyclist, then drove 13 miles as the victim bled to death in the passenger seat. Three months later, the uncertainty remains.

Boggs has since bought a stack of psychology books to learn more about mental illness and donated her jury earnings to a mental health organization in the hope that others could get the help Hernandez apparently could never afford.

“I’m still processing the whole thing,” said Boggs, 56, a retired lab technician who lives in Santa Ana. “It’s hard to get my mind around the fact that this man was obviously sick but wasn’t sick enough to make him insane. This was someone’s life we were deciding.”

Jurors in such trials find themselves thrown into the position of weighing a question as profound as it is elusive: Where is the line that divides sanity and insanity?

And even those who have found an answer say it has not brought relief from the anxiety of playing God. Years after rendering decisions, jurors still agonize over whether they were right.

Despite instructions from judges on how to navigate such criminal cases, jurors say they are overwhelmed by the term “insanity” itself, a word laden with stereotypes.

The consensus among experts is that the insanity defense inevitably creates stumbling blocks for jurors who are asked to consider the word as a legal term, not a medical condition.

Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz, who has probed some of the nation’s darkest minds -- cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer and child drowner Andrea Yates among them -- said “responsible” may be a more logical term for the justice system to adopt.

“We should just leave the word ‘insanity’ out,” Dietz said in an interview at his Newport Beach office. “The fundamental flaw is that its lay meaning is sick, crazy or psychotic. If a juror has that in mind, they can pretty much accept that every murderer is insane.”

As defined by courts in most states, including California, insanity is the inability to distinguish right from wrong in conjunction with mental illness. The consequences of a jury’s verdict are vast: In many cases, it’s the difference between prison and a mental institution. Faced with sorting out monstrous crimes, Dietz said, some jurors may be too eager to conclude that the defendant is insane.

“There is no action that is, by its very nature, insane,” Dietz said. “There is always an alternate explanation.”

Dick Wotruba, a retired community college instructor and psychological counselor with a master’s in psychology, recalls his certainty that he and his fellow jurors got it right in a 2002 trial. They agreed that David Attias was insane when he killed four people by plowing through a throng of Santa Barbara college students with his car, then jumping out and yelling, “I am the angel of death!”

After the jury announced its verdict, though, Attias broke his stony demeanor for the first time in the three-month trial. He grinned and gave his lawyer a bearhug. With that, Wotruba said, the jurors’ confidence dissolved.

“It was a long walk to our cars from the courtroom, wondering, Was this theater? Were we duped?”

Even when the facts seemingly point to one conclusion, conflicting psychiatric testimony complicates matters for jurors, experts said, since they must decide whom to believe. If one side -- almost always the prosecution -- doesn’t present any mental health experts, jurors are left confused, the only seeming explanation being that the defendant is insane.

That was the case for Jeff Takacs, 27, who sat on the jury for Robert Hilbun, a former Dana Point postal worker who stabbed his mother to death at her Corona del Mar home, then donned a T-shirt reading “Psycho” before fatally shooting a former co-worker in the mailroom. Hilbun also tried to kill seven other people during his two-day rampage in 1993, spawned by an obsession with another former co-worker and belief that the world was coming to an end.

Takacs, who took a semester off college for the Hilbun trial and now works at an Irvine medical products company, said the five medical experts who testified that Hilbun was insane seemed at the time to make a formidable case. Now, he said, “I question whether there are very many psychiatrists who’d say he was sane. Isn’t it their job to find as many people insane as possible so they can help them?”

Dietz acknowledged that some mental health experts abuse their role in criminal trials.

“We can all appreciate the need to help a suffering person,” he said. “But the courtroom is not the place to do it.”

The insanity defense began to fall from favor two decades ago, perhaps hitting a low after a jury found that John W. Hinckley Jr. was insane when he tried to kill President Ronald Reagan. Many Americans were left believing that Hinckley had escaped justice through a legal loophole, and subsequent research with real and mock jurors showed that most people believe defense lawyers exaggerate evidence of mental dysfunction to help their clients escape long prison sentences, or death.

Still, those studies have always shown that jurors have sympathy for the mentally ill, said Christopher Slobogin, a University of Florida criminal law professor who has studied insanity defenses. As people learn the extent to which mental illness is genetic or exacerbated by factors over which sufferers have little or no control, jurors will become increasingly open to the insanity defense, he said.

Many prosecutors and defense attorneys believe there’s an upswing in the use of the insanity defense, which they attribute to drug abuse, closed mental hospitals and an increase in diagnoses of mental illness. That belief is based on anecdotal evidence; consistently kept statistics aren’t known.

The Attias trial ended two days before Wotruba and his wife flew to Hawaii for a wedding anniversary -- almost a wasted trip, as far as he was concerned.

“I was so dominated with that trial in terms of my thoughts and energy level. It was such a workout mentally,” he said.

“I’m trained to support mental health,” Wotruba said. “But there is such a problem in our nation that seemingly the only time we really deal with mental illness is after they’ve killed somebody.”