Supreme Court upholds Arizona law on insanity defense

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Arizona's law on the insanity defense is not too restrictive in limiting evidence defendants can present at trial.

By a 6-3 vote, justices affirmed the murder conviction of Eric Clark, who thought he was being pursued by space aliens when he killed an Arizona police officer. Clark, a paranoid schizophrenic who was 17 at the time, is serving 25 years to life in prison.

Prosecutors acknowledged Clark's illness but argued that the schizophrenia did not keep him from understanding right from wrong at the time of the shooting.

Under Arizona's law, defendants may be found "guilty except insane" only if they prove they were so mentally ill that they did not know what they did was wrong.

Clark's case was the first direct constitutional challenge to insanity-defense laws to be heard since states began to restrict them after John Hinckley's acquittal by reason of insanity in the 1981 shooting of President Reagan. Nine other states similarly restricted the insanity defense, and Thursday's ruling gives them additional support. Four states do not allow for insanity defenses at all: Idaho, Kansas, Montana and Utah.

Critics had said Arizona's standard for proving insanity is almost impossible to meet and denies mentally ill defendants the constitutional right to due process.

Clark's lawyers made that argument and also said the judge had unfairly limited the testimony about Clark's underlying illness.

Writing for the majority, Justice David Souter said Arizona has the right to define the insanity defense as long as it meets certain standards, which he said the current law does.

"Arizona's rule serves to preserve the state's chosen standard for recognizing insanity as a defense and to avoid confusion and misunderstanding on the part of jurors," he wrote.

Souter said the state can limit psychiatric testimony to avoid such confusion, given the often dueling opinions of experts and inability of anyone to truly know what is in someone else's mind.

But Justice Anthony Kennedy said in a dissent that restricting expert testimony deprived jurors of evidence they needed to "make sense" of Clark's claims of mental illness.

"In sum, the rule forces the jury to decide guilt in a fictional world with undefined and unexplained behaviors," Kennedy wrote on behalf of himself and Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In 2000, Clark killed Flagstaff Officer Jeffrey Moritz, who was responding to complaints that a pickup truck playing loud rap music was circling a residential block. Moritz, a 30-year-old father of a toddler, was in uniform and driving a patrol car when he stopped Clark, who shot him and fled.

Clark was found incompetent in 2001 and committed to a state hospital. Two years later, the same trial court found that his competence had been restored and ordered him to trial. Clark was found guilty of first-degree murder.