A Colorado judge has approved the administration of “truth serum” to accused mass killer James Holmes, should he plead insanity. The unspecified drug would be used to assess Holmes’ state of mind at the time of the shootings and potentially reveal whether he is faking mental illness. Can you prove that someone is sane by drugging them?

Not reliably. The most likely drug that prosecutors would use on Holmes is sodium amobarbital, also known as sodium amytal. It has dozens of psychiatric applications, but it doesn’t seem to do any of them particularly well.

Like a bad made-for-TV movie, the hurdles to mounting an insanity defense are bordering on crazier than this mass murderer.  According to the piece in Salon, the drug of choice is sodium amobarbital:

To conduct a so-called narcoanalytic interview, psychiatrists put the patient on an intravenous drip of sodium amobarbital until he slurs his speech or shows some other manifestation of the drug’s effects. The questions are easy at first—What is your name? How old are you? Where are you right now?—then progress to the incident the interviewer is focused on. The psychiatrist often uses emotionally evocative questioning to startle the subject into disclosing suppressed memories of the event. While experts debate the procedure’s effectiveness in general, everyone agrees that narcoanalytic interviews are useless on certain people. Some subjects fall asleep before the interviewer gets to the important questions, while others are so punchy that their responses are gibberish.

At the New Scientist, speculation as to the “truth serum” centers on sodium pentothal and oxytocin, both of which it concludes are largely worthless.  Regardless of which drug a government-chosen psychiatrist may prefer to inject into Holmes given the court’s approval of a “narcoanalytic interview,” yet another constitutional question arises:

The possible use of truth drugs is a surprising development in the Holmes trial, says Jason Odeshoo at law firm Jenner & Block in Chicago, Illinois. He says the value of such drugs in this particular case is unclear. “Regardless of their effectiveness, administering truth serums arguably violates an individual’s rights under the US constitution,” he says. “However, the constitutional implications of using a truth serum to test an insanity plea are less clear.”

This turn of events not only subjects the defendant to interrogation in defiance of his 5th Amendment rights, but now subjects him to drug-induced confession, regardless of the dubious merit of the narcoanalytic possibilities. 

As troubling as the compelled confession of a defendant interposing an insanity defense may be, the idea that he would be subject to undergo drug-induced confession takes it to a whole, new level. Adding the dubious efficacy of the method, and it’s just, well, nuts.

It seems that these outlandish measures are all to avoid the possibility that Holmes is not guilty by reason of insanity, such that he will be Hinkley’d and spend decades, if not the rest of his life, in a secure psychiatric facility.  Because that’s so much fun and nobody in Colorado would get the satisfaction of hearing the word “guilty” and the comfort of the imposition of sentence.  Would it  be so awful that this defendant, who engaged in conduct so utterly crazy and horrible that it defies any rational explanation, would be found insane?

As was the case with Gilberto Valle, the “cannibal cop,” there will be few who will feel the slightest sympathy for Holmes given the enormity of the harm and pain he caused. Yet, it’s the case of the despised defendants where the law takes a headlong dive to the bottom, where rulings for the least sympathetic defendant are made and create the precedent that is later applied to defendants who are nowhere near as hated.  We do not challenge the rulings because we think well of a psycho mass murderer, but because of the next defendant who will be subject to a narcoanalytic interview because it was unfashionable to object to it here.

The public perception is that there is something fundamentally wrong with a system that would allow James Holmes to “get away with it” by a finding of not guilty by reason of insanity.  This is the driving force behind the changes in Colorado law following the Hinckley assassination attempt, and the cavalier evisceration of constitutional rights as the price of pleading the defense. 

Or maybe it’s the public bloodlust for executing our most despised defendants that stands in the way or realizing that there is no joy to be found in a life in an insane asylum.  And yet, the court has done everything possible to make the price of an insanity plea as onerous as possible. 

Ironically, the only thing that could make the public perception of the criminal justice system worse in light of the horrors of this case would be a reversal on appeal based upon the court’s ruling that the defendant be compelled to have drugs pumped into his veins so that he can be made to tell the truth.  If the survivors of this tragedy hate the idea that Holmes might “get away with it,” imagine how bad it would be for this conviction to be reversed.