It was a famous legal victory: forty years of confinement

John Hinckley, the man who sought to assassinate President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981, has been granted unconditional release from his psychiatric confinement by a federal judge.

If all goes as expected, Hinckley will be leaving where he chooses, coming and going as he pleases, as of June 2022, forty years after he was found not guilty by reason of insanity by a jury in Washington D.C.

Hinckley was born in May 1955 to a wealthy family in the oil business. He was not yet 26, then, when he shot and severely injured President Reagan and three other people -- a police officer, a secret service agent, and Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady.

Hinckley was infatuated with the actress Jodie Foster, best known at the time for the 1976 film Taxi Driver, in which it is precisely infatuation with Jodie Foster’s character (as above) that causes the character played by Robert De Niro to attempt a political assassination.

Hinckley wrote Foster a letter, an hour before his assassination, in which he told her he would soon commit a “historical deed” that might cause her to “look into your heart” and grant him “your love and respect.”

The psychiatrists who testified at his trial, for both prosecution and defense, agreed that he was mentally ill, although their precise diagnoses differed. The ultimate question was whether his mental disease or defect rendered him incapable of appreciating the difference between right and wrong or unable to conform his behavior to the requirements of the law.

Having “won” the jury verdict on that point, Hinckley was committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital, living very much as one lives in prison, for 30 years. His gradual road to freedom became 10 years ago, and now seems about to come to a culmination.

That courtroom victory wasn't all it was cracked up to be, I suppose.

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