Barbara Kirwin profiles her most grisly cases: the superhero-obsessed paranoid Chandran Nathan, who riddled the medical student fiance of his goddaughter with forty-one shots from an MAK-90; college student Stephanie Wernick, who calmly suffocated her newborn baby and threw it away in a dormitory trash can; Richard Winkler, who in a religious fervor disemboweled his minister with a hunting knife as he prayed on Thanksgiving morning. Were these killers insane at the time of their crimes? Barbara Kirwin takes the reader on a compelling journey into the heart of human darkness to find the answers. With the authority of experience, Kirwin delivers a stinging critique of recent abuses of the insanity defense. Savvy defense attorneys all too often get away with what she calls "designer defenses" - post-partum psychosis, adopted child syndrome, even sleepwalking - to get their clients acquitted. Media sensationalism and high-priced psychological "experts, " too, have left the public with only a muddled idea of what legal insanity really is. As a result, juries are sending violent criminals to mental hospitals and putting bona fide schizophrenics in prison. Ultimately, The Mad, the Bad, and the Innocent shows us how the courts can ensure that true justice is carried out and that criminals - insane or not - get exactly what they deserve.
