John Hinckley: the judge should have just said "no".

• Author: Vatz, Richard E.
• Position: Granted unsupervised day trips

U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE Paul L. Friedman has ruled that John W. Hinckley may take short, unsupervised--at least by the state or any other official organ--trips around Washington, D.C. This rifling comes after 21 years of Hinckley's not being allowed to leave the grounds of the hospital in which he was incarcerated some time after shooting Pres. Ronald Reagan and others in 1981. The only stipulations, according to The Washington Post, are that Hinckley's parents must be with him at all times and notify the judge and local authorities if there is any "hint" of trouble. It is unclear who gets to define "hint." Hinckley's parents also must carry a cell phone, and Hinckley himself must avoid contact with Leslie DeVeau, a (former?) girlfriend who killed her 10-year-old child and similarly was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Thus, this would-be assassin finally has succeeded in his latest attempt to secure unsupervised leaves from St. Elizabeth's Hospital. His attorneys argued that his menial health had improved over the 20-plus years he has been incarcerated and that such leaves would constitute a "critical component" of his treatment.

The appropriate response to the psychobabbling argument that such releases would have a salutary effect on Hinckley's treatment is provided by Reagan's daughter Patti Davis' rhetorical question posed in a poignant essay in Newsweek's Web Exclusive: "Who cares?"

That is to say, concern regarding Hinckley's treatment, even if such excursions would have a "positive therapeutic effect," is a relatively unimportant issue. What is more relevant is the safety of innocent citizens and the sensitivities of those who loved the ex-president and those who care about the permanently injured former Reagan press secretary, James Brady, as well as the other victims and threatened individuals of the 1981 assassination attempt, such as actress Jodie Foster. The Bradys, as a matter of policy, do not comment on such Hinckley matters, but Reagan's family consistently has opposed such unsupervised releases, which, one should note, are the step just prior to permanent release.

Even if the only issue was the safety of citizens, the request should have been rejected. Various studies have shown that psychiatrists are wrong far more often than they are correct in predicting who will he violent and who will not. This is not surprising. Only if one believed psychiatry's self-serving rhetoric would one surmise that it actually constitutes a...