God and the devil in Texas

Backinthedays when I did the people’s business, I successfully opposed the appeal of Arthur Jackson, convicted of the savage knife attack against actress Teresa Saldana. Without doubt, Jackson was crazy—a wildly delusional paranoid schizophrenic convinced that he had been appointedbythe Archangel Michael to take Ms. Saldana to heaven. Under a legal insanity standard similar to Texas’s, I demonstrated that, although mentally ill, Jackson understood his actions to be violative of earthly norms: He knew that under the laws of the state of California his acts were forbidden.

On April 3, a Texas jury found Deanna Laney not guilty by reason of insanity of the murder of two of her sons based upon a belief that God had ordered her to kill them. She was committed to a secure psychiatric facility from which she may be released at any time upon certification of recovery by a Texas judge.

Predictably, this result has given rise to probing comparisons with the case of Andrea Yates, who drowned five of her children in 2001, was found guilty of capital murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Yates, like Mrs. Laney, was incontestably mentally ill at the time of her crimes and also suffered from intense religious delusions. The ongoing legal debate is really an attempt to explain the difference between these two outcomes.

Various factual distinctions have been raised. Yates’ 911 call was evasive in that she failed to tell dispatchers what she had done, and she specifically requested that police be sent, while Mrs. Laney immediately volunteered the nature of her acts. This, it is suggested, points to Yates’ awareness of the evil nature of her deeds: She wanted police officers (the arresters of evildoers) sent out and, due to consciousness of guilt, she couldn’t articulate her horrible crimes during the call.

A second popular explanation for the difference in verdicts concerns the psychiatric testimony, with all experts in the Laney case agreeing that she met the criteria for legal insanity in Texas, while there was disagreement as to Yates. Other, less telling, conjectures include the difference in the method used to kill (drowning in the Yates case; smashing of heads with rocks — a Biblical form of punishment — in Mrs. Laney’s case); the death-penalty-qualified jury (one that was statistically less likely to be lenient) in the Yates case; and the fact that Yates had apparently concealed her plans for a time.

The one possible explanation that has received the least attention — and the one that I find most troubling — involves the purported sources of the extra-terrestrial commands each woman allegedly received.

Yates claimed that Satan told her to kill her kids to save them from eternal damnation, while Mrs. Laney believed that God required her act to prove her faith and that she was without discretion to disobeytheinfallible Almighty. The frightening implication here is the jury may have reasoned that a “message” from Satan should have been resisted, while one from God was more problematic. The tie-in with the controversy surrounding the release of the film, The Passion of the Christ, can’t be ignored.

WithEasterand Passover upon us, the centrality of sacrifice in our Judeo-Christian culture becomes even more visible, and who among us could with certainty rule out the possibility that the Lord might call upon us, like Abraham, to sacrifice a life for some noble purpose? I seriously doubt that any credible religious figure would endorse this proposal. I know that the Talmudic response is in the negative.

But we must recall that it is insanity that is being considered here. If the verdicts in these two so very similar cases turned on whether the jurors preferred an order to murder from “God” over one from “Satan” — as filtered through the disordered brains of two seriously disturbed women — then more than mere injustice has occurred. A more accurate description might well be insanity itself, if not blasphemy.

Frederick Grab is a former California deputy attorney general.