An Insane System

 Monday, July 30, 2001; Page A14 THE U.S. COURT of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled Friday that Russell Weston Jr., the man accused of killing two Capitol police officers three years ago, could be forcibly medicated in an effort to render him competent for trial. In itself, the ruling is a good thing. Mr. Weston, who refuses treatment, is a paranoid schizophrenic; his delusions make him so dangerous that the government has had to hold him in seclusion, and his condition has deteriorated. Failing to medicate him is inhumane, for whatever Mr. Weston purports to want, anti-psychotic injections are the only treatment likely to improve his dreadful condition.

Humanitarian concerns, however, are not the reason the government has pushed to treat Mr. Weston. The Justice Department wishes to medicate Mr. Weston so that it can bring him to trial and punish him -- it has not ruled out ultimately executing him. The threat of the death penalty has forced his lawyers to resist needed treatment in order to protect their client's life; if competency is not restored, no trial or execution can take place. This absurd standoff will be relieved somewhat if the court's decision -- which still may be appealed -- leads to Mr. Weston's appropriate treatment. But the court's embrace of the peculiar idea of administering medicine in order to enable punishment is dismaying.

What function is a trial intended to serve in a case like this? Trials, in part, are designed to resolve disputed issues of fact. The key facts here are not debatable. There is little doubt that Mr. Weston committed the horrifying crimes with which he is charged. Yet the notion of legal insanity has no meaning if it does not describe him. It's hard to imagine that trying, convicting and sentencing Mr. Weston -- to confinement, to death or to anything else -- would deter other paranoid schizophrenics from acting on their murderous delusions. Nor is it clear what great retributive interest is served by punishing someone who believes that he is saving the world from cannibals, that time reverses itself and that the people he killed are not permanently dead.

In a more reasonable system, the prosecution and defense would be able to stipulate to both Mr. Weston's guilt and his insanity. He then would be hospitalized and treated, and any consideration of his punishment would be deferred until the day -- which would, in all likelihood, never arrive -- that would otherwise see his release. Under current law, however, the government would have to acknowledge that Mr. Weston was "not guilty" in order to resolve the case without a trial, and it would then risk the chance that he might be released if his condition improved significantly. That raises the possibility of an outcome that neither provides society with the assignment of accountability for horrid crimes that people reasonably want nor offers guarantees of long-term public safety. The current system makes appropriate dispositions of cases such as Mr. Weston's needlessly difficult.

What is clear, however, is that the government's refusal to take the death penalty off the table is not helping anything. Lawyers in this case should reach an arrangement in which Mr. Weston is both hospitalized and isolated permanently from society. Threatening death does not bring about such a resolution.