Insanity

What confessed Wisconsin serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer did to the 17 men and boys he murdered and dismembered in his home over a 10-year period was either the work of a very sick person or of a supremely evil one. A jury in Milwaukee now has to decide.If the jury finds that Dahmer was "sane" at the time he committed his grisly acts, he surely will receive a life sentence in prison. If it finds he was insane, he would be handed over to a mental institution where, after only one year, he could petition for release every six months.

Republicans in Washington seem to have recognized that refusing to raise the debt ceiling and putting the nation on the brink of default in a trumped-up "crisis" isn't playing well with the general public, so they're switching tactics. Now, instead of blindly driving off the cliff of fiscal Armageddon, they are pushing for the Obama administration to prioritize federal obligations - so the country can be late on some bills but not on debt payments, Social Security checks and pay for active-duty members of the military.

Arthur Donald Copeland, the Pasadena man charged with shooting his wife in a crowded parking lot at Marley Station mall, yesterday pleaded not criminally responsible by reason of insanity.Also yesterday, a Circuit Court judge denied a prosecutor's request that Copeland's$100,000 bond be revoked. A friend posted bond for Copeland shortly after the 57-year-old man's January arrest on charges of assault withintent to murder, but Copeland's attorney said the man will remain institutionalized until his trial.

I couldn't agree more with Dan Rodricks ' recent column on marijuana policy ("The nonsense of marijuana busts shown," Nov. 11). It should be apparent to all except those with a vested interest in keeping marijuana banned that our entire "war on drugs," and especially the nation's marijuana policy, has utterly failed. It has failed for the same reason the ban on alcohol failed during Prohibition - there simply is so much demand for marijuana that no amount of tax dollars can stop the supply.

The Anne Arundel County state's attorney yesterday challenged the insanity defense filed by former Northeast High teacher Ronald Walter Price, who is charged with sexually abusing three of his students.Mr. Price, who resigned in May, was charged in April with three counts of child sexual abuse, unnatural and perverted sex practices and a fourth-degree sex offense. He is accused of having sex with students, sometimes in the school building.Mr. Price, 49, has admitted on national television that he had sex with as many as seven students -- including his current wife -- over a 20-year period.

The squalid case of Ron Price, the Northeast High School teacher charged with having sex with minors at his school, has taken a turn for the worse. A court-appointed psychiatrist reportedly has found that Mr. Price ''suffers from compulsive sexual deviance.'' The operative word here is ''compulsive,'' which means that the psychiatrist alleges that Mr. Price cannot control what he does.Mr. Price's lawyer commented that he was ''very pleased'' with the finding. No doubt. The success of Mr. Price's insanity plea almost certainly will rest on his ability to ''prove'' that he could not control his behavior, and psychiatric testimony to that effect is key. There surely will be further testimony supporting that claim by Mr. Price's own hired-gun psychiatrists.

This was no ordinary trial. The courtroom was a 150-year-old Protestant church. The attorneys could not object to any testimony. The defendant was 600 years old - and French. Joan of Arc, the warrior burned at the stake for heresy at age 19, appeared in sweat shirt and ponytail before 200 doctors and one Maryland Court of Appeals judge yesterday afternoon as professionals tried to determine whether the girl heroine of France - who claimed to have acted on instructions from God - was, in fact, insane.

Lawyers for Kevin G. Johns Jr., the twice-convicted killer charged with strangling a fellow inmate last year on a prison bus en route from Hagerstown to Baltimore, have filed an insanity plea in his defense. In papers filed this week in Worcester County Circuit Court and later received by Baltimore County prosecutors, defense attorneys wrote that Johns is not criminally responsible by reason of insanity for the death of inmate Philip E. Parker Jr. "At the time of the criminal conduct, because of a mental disorder or mental retardation, [Johns]

Prosecutors tried unsuccessfully yesterday to bar testimony about Jason Aaron DeLong's claims of insanity until after a jury decides whether he killed his mother and her boyfriend in her Westminster apartment last summer.Saying that the issues raised by Mr. DeLong's claims of insanity are an inseparable part of his defense, Carroll Circuit Judge Francis M. Arnold denied a pretrial prosecution motion to split the expected four-week trial into two parts.Baltimore Assistant State's Attorneys Timothy J. Doory and Ara Crowe, who are prosecuting the case, argued that a jury should not have to weigh Mr. DeLong's insanity arguments at the same time it considers his guilt or innocence.

Ronald Walter Price, the former Northeast High School teacher who admits to having sex with students, does not have AIDS, suspects he is a pedophile and will try to convince a jury that he is insane when his case goes to trial, Mr. Price and his lawyers said yesterday.Mr. Price, who resigned Friday amid charges of child abuse for his relationships with three former students, said after a pretrial hearing that he felt it was his duty to release results of his test for the HIV virus."I feel obligated to let the other person know that it was negative," the former social studies teacher said.

There he goes again. The foolishness periodically advanced by Dan Rodricks that more stringent gun laws will somehow cause a reduction in gun crimes ("Adapting to the newest form of gun insanity," July 24) is belied by history, common sense and the real world. Even Draconian gun control regimens imposed by governments of all kinds since the invention of gunpowder have failed to make a dent in the acquisition of arms by those intent on criminality, be they drug traffickers in Mexico or East Baltimore, madmen in Norway or Colorado, terrorists in almost every country in the world, insurgents, justified or not, of all kinds, and those motivated by more mundane factors - lust, greed, envy, revenge, etc. Very few of the huge number of public shootings in Baltimore each year are committed by those who acquired their weapons legally.

What happens now - if it hasn't already - is that we adapt to another form of insanity. We add movie theaters to the list of places where random violence might erupt. Some of us look for online tutorials in how to survive a mass shooting at the cinema. Others, taking no chances, get guns and permits to carry them. "No place is safe," I heard a retired Marine say the other day. There are too many guns - almost one for every American by now - and too many people with untreated mental illness.

Every time we invade a foreign country, it makes the people mad as hell. In no time at all, they start tossing bombs and killing our soldiers. So please, let's stop this audacious insanity and bring the troops home now. Daniel K. Hays Towson

I pay my taxes. I will not offend your intelligence by pretending to enjoy it. Writing that check is about as enjoyable as a chain-saw root canal. But I don't resent it, either. I pay my taxes because this is how we the people pay for things we deem to be in our communal interest. This is how our military is sustained. This is how our children are educated. This is how our potholes are filled. This is how our libraries are stocked. This is how our police officers are supplied.

I could not believe it when I read that Baltimore City is rehabbing four homes on Preston Street with $1.9 million in taxpayer dollars ("Is this house worth $475K?" June 19). The government, as The Sun put it, hopes to spur development there. But if it doesn't work — which it won't — how about paying us back? How many more times will this type of insane rehabbing be allowed to go on at taxpayer expense? Darlene McKinney

Comedian Jon Stewart appeared on Fox News Sunday yesterday and participated in a somewhat heated (but relatively polite) exchange with host Chris Wallace.  It was a pretty good debate ( The Sun's venerated TV critic David Zurawik even got a shout-out) but both Stewart and Wallace were, in my opinion, somewhat wrong.  Stewart is partially wrong when he says that Fox News is "A biased organization, relentlessly promoting an ideological agenda under the rubric of being a news organization" -- and not only because he uses the word "rubric" instead of "guise.

HOUSTON -- Andrea Yates, who said she drowned her five children in the bathtub because she believed she was saving them from Satan, was found not guilty by reason of insanity yesterday at her second murder trial. The fact that Yates was mentally ill - she said she believed she was possessed by the devil and that the media had planted bugs in her house to record her poor parenting - was never in doubt during the four-week trial. Neither was the fact that she had committed the crimes: She called 911 minutes after killing the children and confessed.

Former Northeast High School teacher Ronald Walter Price, who has admitted having sex with seven students, will try to convince a jury that he was insane during at least some of the relationships, his lawyer said yesterday.Mr. Price, who resigned his teaching post May 28, was charged in April with three counts of child sexual abuse, unnatural and perverted sex practices and a fourth-degree sex offense for allegedly having sex with students, sometimes in the school building.Jonathan Resnick, one of Mr. Price's two Baltimore lawyers, said his client's pleas were filed by mail yesterday.

I usually try to be the type of person you don't go out of your way to avoid. (Here in Janet's World, we aim high with our interpersonal communication goals.) Most days I am successful in my attempts not to be offensive. As a result, I may even take it for granted that I am at ease in most social situations. But that was before last week, when I took a volunteer job that caused me to stand in the shoes of the undesirables. For two hours, I joined the ranks of the debt collectors, the tax auditors, the process servers — perhaps even the colonoscopy administrators.

Two mental health experts, one for the defense, the other for the prosecution, provided dueling assessments Thursday of the sanity of a 60-year-old woman accused of killing her husband a year ago. The defense witness, Bethany Brand, a psychologist on the faculty of Towson University, said that while Mary C. Koontz "did not seem overly psychotic," she showed some psychotic symptoms, including three types of so-called disassociation disorders, as...