A Mad Terrorist

Posted on April 19, 2006 in Justice Stigma

A few months back, a friend of mine went into episode. She walked into a Payless Shoe Store and started trying on shoes. Another idea seized her and she walked out of the store wearing the shoes she’d been trying: a pink tennis shoe on one foot and a hiking boot on the other. The police arrested her after the management called them.

Upon her release from the hospital a few weeks later, she went to the manager of the store to ask if she would drop the charges. No dice, said the manager. We prosecute everyone. In court, my friend presented the papers that showed she’d been committed because of a manic episode. The judge sneered at this evidence and threw the book at her.

This is typical of the way the courts treat the mentally ill.

Zacarias Moussaoui shows every sign of being insane. The alledged 911 conspirator believes several interesting things. Various delusions actions of Moussaoui’s suggest paranoid schizophrenia:

• President Bush will free him from prison
• Moussaoui shouted out “beautiful terrorist mind”, apparently in reference to remarks made by Mr Amador on Monday (BBC)
• He covers the floor of his cell with wet paper towels
• He spits water at his guards
• He believes that if he sits with defense lawyers, they will pretend that he is attacking them so that U.S. Marshals can kill him.
• He believes that the FBI bugged his fan before he was arrested (he was, in fact, in jail at the time of the bombings)
• He keeps changing his mind about whether or not he wants a Muslim lawyer. He accuses the defense of not trying hard enough to find one. (The problem is that no Muslim lawyer wants to go near this case.)
• He keeps changing his mind on whether he wants to be a martyr or be set free.
• He demands that defense lawyers stop filing motions because filing them violates his religion, but he files dozens of motions himself.”
• He does not want to press an insanity plea

I don’t know if Moussaoui had anything to do with the bombings. I get the sick feeling that his mental illness is being used as a tool to sacrifice him to appease those who didn’t get Osama Bin Laden’s head on a platter. He may need to be locked up for the rest of his life, but I don’t think a fair hearing is possible in this highly charged political climate. He may die even through he has nothing to do with 911. He may die because people distrust him for being a Muslim and dislike him for being mentally ill.

Moussaoui is unable to make a consistent, coherent defense. Most people do not realize that the insane do not stay crazy for good: they waver in and out of episode, often rapidly. I do not know if Moussaoui has been put on medications or has been seeing a psychiatrist. It seems that this is not so.

Those of us who suffer from organic brain dysfunctions may not want to help Moussaoui out of fear or disgust with what he is alledged to do. Some give up, write him off as doomed. I think we should raise our voices. Execution of the mentally ill threatens all of us. Never should we allow any of our kind to die because some prosecutor wants to chalk up a state murder because of his political ambitions or a corrupt administration wants to pretend that it is doing something when it is actually squandering taxpayer dollars.

The whole point of justice is to obtain a truthful picture of what happened and the factors that contributed to that. Black and white thinking does not yield the best results, not when the issue is shoes, not when the issue is terrorism.

Found through Tea