Juries not crazy about insanity pleas

But is he insane?

Eddie, you'll remember, was the fellow who came home from the VA hospital psych unit and, without provocation, without so much as a rude word, decided to act on these nagging homicidal urges.

He got up from the couch, broke the neck of a 67-year-old woman. He stabbed her repeatedly.

Gryczan killed his mother. But the public's diagnosis of madness probably was clinched by those days, maybe it was weeks, in January 1993, when Gryczan continued living in that Pompano Beach condominium, impervious to a deteriorating body sprawled across the bedroom floor.

Crazy. But not necessarily insane. Not in a courtroom. When Broward Circuit Court jurors ponder first-degree murder charges against Gryczan next week, they'll consider a very narrow definition of mental illness.

Any insanity defense hinges first on a need to prove the defendant suffered from a mental illness. No problem for a 49-year-old fellow who was hospitalized in the fall of 1993 with psychiatric problems, including suicidal and homicidal urges. He told doctors he wanted to kill his mother.

But then an insanity defense gets complicated. The defendant must demonstrate -- at the moment he committed the criminal act -- that he was either unaware of the consequences, or that he couldn't distinguish between right and wrong.

``This ought to be a dream defense,'' said Bill Lazwell, one of the lawyers defending Gryczan. ``It ought to be a slam dunk.''
It isn't. Juries don't often buy an insanity defense.

The obvious problem is that no medical diagnosis corresponds to this legal term ``insanity'' -- these cases tend to come down to the prosecution's psychiatric experts contradicting the defense's experts.

The greater obstacle, however, may be that the more defense lawyers paint their clients as bizarre and crazy, the more reluctant juries are to turn 'em loose. Insane or not.

Gryczan hardly seems as crazy as Milwaukee's cannibalistic serial murderer, Jeffrey Dahmer. But a jury rejected Dahmer's insanity defense. They deduced that Dahmer was sane or, more likely, they just wanted Dahmer behind bars. Forever.

Plenty of convincing testimony last month described John Salvi III, the Brookline, Mass., abortion clinic killer, as a paranoid schizophrenic, driven mad by his religious delusions. Probably. But a jury preferred him in prison.

Unsympathetic juries might reflect a general suspicion that, amid a national epidemic of violent crime, cold-blooded killers are cloaking their homicidal calculations behind the insanity defense.
Nationwide, 75 percent of court cases built around an insanity defense end in guilty verdicts. (According to a study by the American Psychiatric Association, defendants plead insanity in fewer than 1 percent of criminal cases.)

For the sake of fairness, the insane, or at least the crazy, ought not face the same consequences as some mentally competent felon. Florida needs another option. About a dozen states allow juries to find defendants ``guilty but mentally ill'' and provide psychiatric treatment for the convicted.

But the jury considering Eddie Gryczan's case next week gets only two options: guilty or insane. The real verdict ought to be ``both of the above.''