Top court tackles insanity defense

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court justices rarely talk about Martians.

But on Wednesday, extraterrestrials were at the heart of a case brought by a schizophrenic teenager who says he killed an Arizona police officer because he thought the lawman was a space alien.

Until now, the high court has avoided challenges to insanity defense laws, even as states around the country toughened their laws following John Hinckley's acquittal by reason of insanity in the 1981 shooting of President Ronald Reagan.

It was a surprise when justices agreed to review Eric Michael Clark's case, and they seemed uninterested Wednesday in broadly addressing the constitutional rights of psychotic criminal defendants whose lawyers want them sentenced to psychiatric facilities instead of prisons.

Court members, however, did repeatedly refer to the unusual facts of Clark's case, signaling that they are likely to rule very narrowly. He was a popular football star until he became convinced that aliens had taken over his town, Flagstaff, Ariz., as a "platinum city" and that his own parents were aliens.

Justices David H. Souter and Stephen Breyer both mentioned Martians.

Justices John Paul Stevens questioned whether someone who thought he was on a mission to kill space aliens could receive the death penalty for killing a person instead.

When Arizona lawyer Randall Howe said that the slain officer was wearing a uniform and driving a police cruiser, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that Clark's lawyer "wants to introduce (evidence) on the other side, 'I had delusions; I thought I killed an alien.' "

The Supreme Court has never said mentally ill accused criminals have the right to an insanity defense, and four states do not allow for that: Idaho, Kansas, Montana and Utah.

The remaining states have a variety of standards for proving insanity, and Clark's lawyer argued that Arizona's is almost impossible to meet, violating the constitutional rights of mentally ill defendants.

Texas has a similar law and the court's ruling in Clark's appeal could affect Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who drowned her five children in the bathtub and goes on trial in June.

"The state has the right to define insanity as it sees fit," Howe told the justices.