The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments recently on how far states can go toward eliminating the insanity defense in criminal trials as it reviews the case of a Kansas man sentenced to die for killing four relatives.
The high court plans to hear James Kraig Kahler’s case. He went to the home of his estranged wife’s grandmother in Osage County the weekend after Thanksgiving 2009 and fatally shot the two women and his two teenage daughters.
Kahler’s attorneys don’t argue that he killed them. They’ve argued that he was in the grips of a depression so severe that he experienced and extreme emotional disturbance that disassociated him from reality.
In seeking a not guilty verdict due to his mental state, his defense at his 2011 trial faced what critics see as an impossible legal standard. His attorneys now argue that Kansas violated the U.S. constitution by denying him the right to pursue and insanity defense.
The Supreme Court has given states broad latitude in how they treat mental illness in criminal trials, allowing five states, including Kansas, to abolish the traditional insanity defense. Kahler’s appeal raises the question of whether doing so denies defendants their guaranteed right to due legal process.
