This is the old insanity debate. I don’t know if this guy is legally sane or not, and I’m not arguing one way or the other.
But in general in our society, we believe in responsibility. If a person is not capable of being responsible, we don’t hold them responsible. If you are mentally ill, you may not make decisions you would make if your illness was cured. Killing someone for what they did while mentally ill is like killing someone for having breast cancer. It makes no sense.
I think the problem is that people don’t understand how someone could not be responsible for a set of decisions. I understand that. I’m afraid that it would take having the experience of taking a pill and finding yourself doing something that was heinous to you in order to understand the effect that brain chemistry has on thinking and personality.
I know it’s hard to imagine you might ever be mentally ill. And it is true that the older you get without being mentally ill, the less likely you will ever have that experience. However, it does happen. I hope noone here ever gets mentally ill later in life. I hope noone kills anyone because they are mentally ill. I hope no one loses a job or a house or a spouse or children due to mental illness.
I also hope it doesn’t take getting ill to start to have some empathy for people who suffer with mental illness, even if they do kill people. The death penalty for mentally ill people does not make any of the rest of safer. In fact, it makes people less likely to get help if they start feeling weird. We stigmatize those with weird thoughts far too much as it is. It doesn’t help us achieve a safer society.