and trial. He subsequently fled the U.S., returning in 1995 to kill again. The bill was sent to the Assembly.If a person gets a gun and ammunition, climbs behind the wheel of a car, then drives from place to place shooting selected victims based on ethnicity, doesn't that show he had intent to kill -- even if he suffers from mental illness? Not necessarily. Under Pennsylvania's criminal code, the scenario may not fit the legal definition of criminal intent. Persuading a jury to make that determination, however, is extremely difficult, and in practical terms, few such defendants are found not guilty by reason of insanity. Still, a distinction does exist between the meaning of "intent" inside and outside a courtroom. "The ability to do simple or rote tasks like stopping at a traffic light, does not necessarily translate into the ability to form specific, legal intent to kill," said Rob Dunham, a federal defender in Philadelphia who specializes in post-conviction appeals of death penalty cases. One example would be David Berkowitz, or "Son of Sam," who believed he was receiving messages from a dog who ordered him to kill. "He was perfectly capable of driving and formulating plans for carrying out a murder," Dunham said, but that didn't make him capable of legal intent. "If your mental illness is such that you can't conform your conduct to the law or appreciate the wrongfulness of your conduct, it doesn't matter that your mind is able to take the steps required to kill somebody." A jury that finds a defendant incapable of forming intent may find him guilty of a reduced charge such as third-degree murder or voluntary manslaughter. But mental illness is always a tough sell in the courtroom, which is one reason lawyers rarely employ it. An eight-state study reported in the Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry in 1991 showed that the insanity defense was used in fewer than 1 percent of the cases of a representative sampling of the sta...
