Why Was Jeffrey Dahmer Sane if John Hinckley Jr. Was Not? (2024)

Jeffrey Dahmer ate people. He killed human beings, sexually violated their corpses, and stored body parts nearby in order to feel close to them. In some cases, he attempted to lobotomize victims in order to exert mind control over zombie slaves. Wild ideas filled the man's head and dark desires drove him.

Professionals could not agree on how to diagnose the man. A jury found Jeffrey Dahmer to be sane and therefore guilty, which surprised many Americans. How could that guy not be insane? A number have suggested that jury members found him sane despite obvious insanity just so they could make sure he got his guilty verdict.

Jeffrey Dahmer was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and 13 of first-degree intentional homicide. All victims were young men he murdered, mutilated, and dismembered, preserving heads and genitals in his refrigerator.

Psychiatrists who appeared as expert witnesses at Dahmer's trial suggested no fewer than four different personality disorders (borderline, antisocial, schizotypal, or personality disorder NOS), but personality disorders are not about the kinds of psychotic states likely to result in a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI). Suggestions included assertions that he was a necrophile or sexual sad*st driven by impulses he could not resist, but even if they were right, irresistible impulse is not commonly accepted as the sole criterion for insanity. He developed plans and exerted enough self-control to conceal his inner chaos when questioned by police. He even tricked officers into turning back over to him a victim who had escaped from captivity only to be killed after Dahmer got him back. Over time, he became more reckless, as will happen with many serial killers.

John Hinckley Jr. did not eat people. He did not drug people and strangle them with his bare hands. He did not have sex with corpses. No, he shot at President Ronald Reagan, attempting to assassinate him. A ricochet struck Reagan in the chest, but the President survived. Bullets wounded a Secret Service agent who recovered from his injury, a police officer who eventually had to retire due to nerve damage, and Press Secretary James Brady who spent the rest of his life with slurred speech and paralysis that left him wheelchair-bound.

While Hinckley was not the most accurate with his aim, the detailed plan together with sense of purpose and awareness of actions left much of the nation shocked when he received his NGRI verdict. His insanity verdict hung largely on his motive: He wanted to date Jodie Foster, and he decided that committing an assassination would make him famous enough for her to date him. It is a strange and unrealistic notion, to be sure, but is it stranger than eating people to feel close to them or pouring acid into some victims' skulls in the belief this would create zombified slaves? Which is unrealistic fantasy, and which is delusion?

Many people consider Dahmer's ideas and motives to be patently more bizarre than Hinckley's, so how can Dahmer have been the sane one whereas Hinckley was not? One answer may lie in a mere matter of timing: Hinckley's verdict led to changes in insanity laws in the decade before Dahmer got caught and had his day in court. Getting a verdict of NGRI became more difficult in Hinckley's aftermath. Insanity is a legal term, not a modern psychiatric term even though psychiatric and psychological professionals provide assessments and expert opinions that judges and juries might weigh while processing and deliberating over legal decisions. A growing number of states began allowing verdicts of guilty but insane or guilty but mentally ill, but Dahmer did not even get that. He was simply found guilty.

American states and many countries throughout the world follow three main legal definitions for determining insanity. Military courts and roughly half the states apply M'Naughten rules derived a from 19th-century British case and subsequent decisions: Due to a mental defect, an insane individual did not know the nature or quality of the criminal act or, if he or she did know it, that person did not know it was wrong. A less common rule, rare outside New Hampshire and the U.S. Virgin Islands, simply holds that no one could be criminally responsible for actions that were "product of mental disease" regardless of whether that mental disease in any way involved loss of contact with reality. As a middle ground, most other states employ the American Law Institute's definition, exempting from punishment those who lack the mental capacity to conform their conduct to the law or to appreciate the criminality of their own behavior. Hinckley was tried under the ALI standard, but so was Dahmer.

Hinckley committed his crime in a single, horrible event, whereas Dahmer committed his crimes over the course of years and his victims were many. Temporary insanity is easier to consider when the time span is shorter and the incident is singular. Hinckley initially received a diagnosis akin to some that doctors slapped on Dahmer: major depression with "psychotic disorder not otherwise specified," meaning not specifically listed in the DSM while nevertheless qualifying overall as a psychotic syndrome. Psychiatrists also offered some of the same personality disorders for Hinckley would later be suggested for Dahmer.

Speaking of the DSM, Hinckley's diagnosticians would have operated under the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-III (1980), then Dahmer's under the DSM-III-R (1987). Does that matter when insanity is a legal determination rather than a psychiatric one? It might. Merely hearing that any diagnosis exists will guide or at least nudge jurors' thinking. Differences between these two versions of the DSM's third edition do not seem sufficient to account for the major differences in perceptions of Hinckley and Dahmer.

Hinckley's lawyer did report that his client received a stronger diagnosis, schizophrenia. Trial transcripts do, in fact, include discussion about the nature of schizophrenia, and therefore his jury heard this term that was arguably demonized worse and understood less in the early 1980s than today. The expert witnesses against Dahmer argued that he had personality disorders that were "worse than schizophrenia" but untreatable and not psychotic.

Perhaps it simply comes down to how convincing the expert witnesses were in the two respective cases.

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