Vinny

There are limits to that defense, and he wasn't defending himself on the basis of innocence, but rather temporary insanity.

In a case like this, the guy has a history of schizophrenia.

It is an institutional failure.

There's zero question about that.

We live in a world now where you empower mental illness instead of treating it.

And so they say, you can't institutionalize these people because you have to respect autonomy of individuals and leave schizos who are violent and dangerous on the streets because you can't involuntarily confine them anymore.

But him being found criminally incompetent to stand trial, he's not going to go free.

He'll be institutionalized, hopefully for the rest of his life, because once you do something like that in a dissociative state, you are forever a risk to society.

But it's not like he's going to walk free.

This might be one of those cases of a systematic failure of the institutions, but a man who is clearly out of his mind and insane.

It's the meme, like send in a social worker.

That's what they would have done with an individual like this.

He should have been institutionalized.

And you need to bring back mental institutions to some extent, because right now the prison system is the de facto mental institution.

Exactly.

I'm, hey man, hey, I'm on the turn right now.

No, the issue in this case is the violent crime, it's the violent crime coupled with the schizophrenia diagnosis.

When I was a young lawyer at the firm I was at, we used to do these things called motions for confinement.

You'd go to court and you would be basically involuntarily confining an individual who posed a risk to themselves or others.

And some cases were clear cut, others were much more middle ground.