Byron Smith Found Guilty of Murdering Little Falls Teens

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

36. That's not nearly impaired enough for a successful insanity defense.

While it's quite possible he had some sort of personality disorder, to be found legally insane you have to be delusionally psychotic. The statute says: "No person having a mental illness or cognitive impairment so as to be incapable of understanding the proceedings or making a defense shall be tried, sentenced, or punished for any crime; but the person shall not be excused from criminal liability except upon proof that at the time of committing the alleged criminal act the person was laboring under such a defect of reason, from one of these causes, as not to know the nature of the act, or that it was wrong." That's the old "M'Naghten Rule," which pretty much requires you to be, in laymen's terms, batshit crazy or barking mad. Being a neurotic asshole with a bad attitude won't do it.

The last time an insanity defense was successful in this state was about 10 years ago, when a guy was tried for beheading his mother. Before that, in the late '70s a woman who stabbed her (perceived, but not actual) boyfriend's fiancee 97 times was found to have been insane (both are in the state hospital for the criminally insane - a successful insanity defense keeps you out of prison but not out of the mental hospital).