The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1804 - We Investigated The INSANE Loophole That Lets Killers Walk Free

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00:00:57.720 Well, the Supreme Court just issued the ruling on birthright citizenship that we all expected.

00:01:02.720 This is a decision that could have been a historic victory for this country if Republicans were anywhere near as effective and ruthless as the left when it comes to selecting Supreme Court justices.

00:01:13.940 Democrats pick judges who return victories for their side in every case without exception.

00:01:21.440 And on the other hand, Republicans pick judges who are preoccupied with preserving the image of the court as nonpartisan, even though Democrats don't remotely care.

00:01:30.380 They're going to pack the Supreme Court and destroy the judicial branch the next chance they get.

00:01:34.500 With a handful of notable exceptions, particularly Dobbs, the allegedly conservative justices on the court have proven to be unreliable and far too timid.

00:01:43.820 And on this issue, that's especially disgraceful.

00:01:47.240 It's impossible to overstate this. 1.00

00:01:49.200 today's ruling will directly lead to tens of millions more foreigners flooding into this 0.94

00:01:55.400 country, most of whom will have multiple children who will be entitled to a slice of your paycheck. 1.00

00:02:01.200 Most of them will not even attempt to assimilate, which is why large portions of California now 0.99

00:02:05.700 resemble Mexico, why 30 percent of New Yorkers can't speak English, why Somalis run entire 0.98

00:02:11.300 neighborhoods in Minneapolis. None of this is lawful. The 14th Amendment states that all persons 1.00

00:02:17.460 born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens

00:02:23.000 of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. Now, during debates on the amendment

00:02:28.760 in the Senate in May of 1866, Senator Lyman Trumbull declared that, quote, the provision is

00:02:35.980 that all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens.

00:02:41.100 That means subject to the complete jurisdiction thereof. What do we mean by subject to the

00:02:46.240 jurisdiction of the United States, not owing allegiance to anybody else. That is what it

00:02:51.220 means. Meanwhile, Senator Jacob Howard, a free framer of the amendment, stated that he concurred

00:02:58.300 entirely with Trump. So he added that the 14th amendment would not quote include persons born

00:03:05.100 in the United States who are foreigners, aliens who belong to the families of ambassadors or

00:03:10.500 foreign ministers accredited to the government of the United States. Very clearly, as Michael

00:03:14.900 Landon has pointed out, Howard was listing three categories of people who would not be covered by

00:03:19.840 the amendment, including foreigners and aliens. No sane person alive at the time would have ever

00:03:26.900 contemplated the idea that if a Chinese woman flew into Miami while nine months pregnant and

00:03:32.900 then gave birth to a child, then that child must automatically become a United States citizen.

00:03:39.040 They certainly would have contemplated the idea that tens of millions of Mexicans and Haitians 0.75

00:03:43.860 and Guatemalans could colonize entire states simply by invading the country and having a 0.64

00:03:49.980 very large number of children. That's not what they had in mind, obviously, but that's exactly 0.93

00:03:54.360 what has transpired. And the conservatives on the Supreme Court, given a once-in-a-lifetime

00:03:58.720 opportunity to lawfully preserve the future existence of the United States of America,

00:04:03.920 decided instead, at least one of the alleged conservatives, Amy Coney Barrett, decided to 1.00

00:04:09.720 protect her own image as nonpartisan. I mean, catastrophic does not begin to describe this

00:04:17.300 ruling. It's yet another way in which our laws are being bastardized and distorted beyond

00:04:22.660 recognition as a way of transforming this country into something unrecognizable.

00:04:28.160 But rather than generally lamenting this horrible decision, this catastrophic decision,

00:04:34.080 We will go through the decision piece by piece and dismantle it and talk about also where we can go from here.

00:04:42.440 I mean, there are some things we can do in light of this moment to at least mitigate the damage.

00:04:49.540 And we're going to get into all that. We're going to talk about all that in great detail tomorrow.

00:04:54.040 So stay tuned for that.

00:04:56.360 Today, though, we're going to talk about another way, also disastrous, that the legal system has been manipulated in this country.

00:05:04.900 And this is a separate topic, but at the same time, as you'll see, it is related in more ways than you might think.

00:05:11.660 And maybe the most egregious example of what I'm talking about, which often flies under the radar, it isn't discussed very much, concerns the rise of the so-called insanity defense.

00:05:23.040 Now, if you ask the experts, they'll tell you that the insanity defense is rarely invoked.

00:05:28.600 And they'll claim that in the vast majority of cases, the insanity defense is unsuccessful.

00:05:33.320 And even when the insanity defense works, you're told, the perpetrators don't get off easy.

00:05:38.280 They supposedly have to endure a very unpleasant stint in a mental hospital where they'll probably spend the rest of their lives.

00:05:44.120 And you're just supposed to sort of take their word for all of this.

00:05:47.220 Now, all of these claims are false, as we'll discuss at length in a moment.

00:05:50.940 In reality, the insanity defense is one of the most overused and most effective legal defenses that criminals can employ.

00:05:59.120 But before we get into that data and what kind of brings all this up is a case that I want to highlight, which which has to be one of the most disturbing examples of this issue.

00:06:10.220 So in August of 2021 in Miami-Dade County, Florida, a woman named Precious Bland, that's her name, drowned her 15-month-old daughter in a bathtub, killing her, then stabbed her husband in the head and neck when he tried to intervene.

00:06:26.820 And then she also stabbed her teenage daughter, for good measure.

00:06:30.100 It's one of the most gruesome crimes that is imaginable.

00:06:35.040 But Precious Bland was, just a few days ago, this happened late last week.

00:06:40.220 found not guilty by reason of insanity, and she will not spend a single day in a mental institution.

00:06:48.340 She is a free woman after she just murdered her 15-month-old child.

00:06:55.700 Why? Well, because according to the judge and the defense attorneys, COVID made her do it.

00:07:02.260 Yes, COVID compelled her to commit murder and attempted murder, and therefore she's free to go.

00:07:07.460 Now, watch this news report where the anchors, for some reason, are on the beach.

00:07:12.860 I don't know, but here they talk about the case. Watch.

00:07:17.760 A mother here in Miami was found not guilty of killing her one-year-old daughter

00:07:22.580 after she claimed a medical crisis brought on by COVID made her do it.

00:07:27.960 So today, she told NBC6 how she is trying to rebuild her life

00:07:32.120 despite the tragedy that changed her family forever.

00:07:35.380 NBC6's Christian Kulong joins us with a story.

00:07:39.020 Satan is a deceiver.

00:07:41.420 You guys, he's coming back.

00:07:43.340 Accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, please.

00:07:46.680 These were some of the things Precious Bland shouted to police on an August night in 2021.

00:07:52.600 Shortly after, investigators say she drowned her one-year-old daughter,

00:07:56.480 stabbed her husband and teenage daughter.

00:07:58.500 I would not wish this upon anyone to have to go through. 0.65

00:08:04.780 something so tragic. After nearly five years facing murder-related charges for killing her

00:08:11.020 infant, Bland is now a free woman. This week, a judge found her not guilty by reason of insanity

00:08:17.240 after a bench trial where she waived her right to a jury. That was my child. As a mother,

00:08:22.940 I'm here to to protect children and to love them and to give them the best.

00:08:33.860 And that's what I did all my life with my children.

00:08:45.920 COVID took that away from me in that moment.

00:08:50.000 Bland's attorney argued the Navy veteran suffered a psychotic episode triggered by COVID,

00:08:55.700 causing hallucinations and voices that told her to baptize her family members who were also infected with the virus.

00:09:02.580 This was COVID. It's a woman who served our country for five years, combat duty.

00:09:09.800 As a mother, I'm here to protect my children and love them. That's what I did all my life.

00:09:13.800 COVID took that away from me in that moment.

00:09:16.460 Now, we're going to finish the news report in a moment because somehow it gets even more

00:09:20.500 outrageous. But already, just think about the implications of what she's saying and what the

00:09:25.160 judge agreed with. They're saying a viral infection, a respiratory illness that affected

00:09:30.760 more than 100 million Americans and more than 70 percent of adults, somehow compelled this

00:09:35.940 particular woman to murder her own child and then stab her husband and her daughter.

00:09:39.920 I mean, tens of millions of people contracted COVID without murdering anybody, but this one person had no other choice but to start executing her own children.

00:09:50.400 And therefore, we can conclude that COVID makes you commit murder.

00:09:55.260 COVID made her believe that Satan was coming and that she needed to baptize her child by committing murder.

00:10:00.780 What's the evidence for this?

00:10:02.640 There is none.

00:10:04.340 There's not a single person on the planet who can explain how COVID might force somebody to commit murder.

00:10:09.640 There's no scientific paper anywhere that even attempts to outline a biological explanation for any of this.

00:10:16.280 They'll just say that in rare cases, the brain can become inflamed.

00:10:20.820 So their whole argument is that out of 100 million people who contracted COVID, some of them eventually went crazy.

00:10:27.440 But, okay, that doesn't tell us anything because 100 million people is an enormous sample size.

00:10:32.320 In a group of 100 million people every day, some of them are going to act crazy.

00:10:37.620 They might experience some stressful life event, like the death of a family member.

00:10:41.620 They might do drugs.

00:10:42.740 They might have a stroke.

00:10:44.360 They might simply have bad luck in the genetic lottery.

00:10:47.960 Whatever it is, blaming COVID makes about as much sense as blaming whatever brand of cereal they ate for breakfast that morning.

00:10:53.520 It's complete nonsense.

00:10:54.660 But it's not totally unexpected.

00:10:56.580 I mean, this is a natural extension of the fraudulent long COVID narrative, and it's why we need to push back on those claims as well.

00:11:04.180 to be clear, there's no physical test, no blood test, no scan, nothing that a doctor can use to

00:11:10.040 diagnose long COVID, much less COVID psychosis. These are fake disorders, two fake disorders of

00:11:18.320 many that exist entirely in the mind of the person who claims to suffer from them. There's a reason

00:11:23.540 long COVID patients are 80% women, 40% of whom had a preexisting mental health condition. You have a

00:11:30.300 lot of people who are naturally prone to hysteria and panic, and they're blaming a respiratory

00:11:35.100 illness for all of their problems because they don't know what else to do. And doctors are happy

00:11:39.640 to go along with it because they get to bill more therapy sessions and prescribe more medications.

00:11:43.780 So that's what's happening there. But I interrupted that news report, which we should

00:11:48.880 finish. Let's continue here. Judge Miguel de la O ruled that Bland did not understand the nature

00:11:54.260 of her actions at the time and acquitted her. Her attorneys say they believe it's the first

00:11:58.760 successful COVID-related insanity defense in the country. But the decision has drawn sharp

00:12:04.400 criticism from Florida Attorney General James Uthmeyer, who was calling for the judge's

00:12:09.180 impeachment. You have somebody that's drowning a baby and then a judge is, you know, at a bench

00:12:13.500 trial letting her off for insanity and then she's going to go right back out into the public? This

00:12:18.380 is wrong. For Bland, she's now focused on her family, who continues to support her despite

00:12:23.740 everything that has happened. When asked how she wants people to see her today.

00:12:28.860 A loving mother, wife, friend, sister, daughter.

00:12:41.140 So Christian, in a nutshell, COVID made her do it. The judge agreed.

00:12:46.640 Even the news anchors on the beach don't seem to believe what they're hearing.

00:12:50.620 First of all, as best I could tell, this judge, whose name is Miguel de la O, ran unopposed in the last few elections.

00:12:59.000 Voters didn't have another choice.

00:13:01.620 Obviously, that needs to change.

00:13:02.840 If the impeachment isn't successful, which it should be, then somebody needs to run against him.

00:13:08.280 And really, he should be arrested.

00:13:09.960 I mean, this person is dangerous.

00:13:11.140 He's deliberately allowing murderers to get away with the most heinous crimes you can conceive of,

00:13:15.920 which is something, as we've seen, that's become all too common in recent years.

00:13:21.440 Ronald Exantis entered a random house, if you remember, and brutally murdered a six-year-old

00:13:27.000 boy before trying to execute the rest of the family. And he got out of prison in nine years.

00:13:33.340 And now we have a child killer getting zero prison time, period. She's not even going to 0.84

00:13:38.800 an institution. She's free to do whatever she wants. She has a license from the judge to finish

00:13:45.720 off the rest of her children or her husband, which there's a very good chance she will.

00:13:51.260 Now, for the record, prosecutors did establish a motive during the trial.

00:13:55.520 They made the case that Precious Bland was upset about the fact that her husband was cheating on

00:14:00.980 her and she snapped and she became violent. And in her hysterical and homicidal state of mind,

00:14:05.700 she killed her child to punish her husband before trying to kill him as well, which is a very common

00:14:10.760 motive in these kinds of crimes. Watch. Tears filled the courtroom as the mother who admitted

00:14:18.460 to killing her baby daughter was found not guilty by reason of insanity following a two-day bench

00:14:25.040 trial. As to count one, aggravated manslaughter. The defendant is not guilty by reason of insanity.

00:14:30.820 As to count two, attempted murder in the first degree. The defendant is not guilty by reason of

00:14:34.960 insanity. And as to count three attempted murder in the first degree, the defendant is not guilty

00:14:40.040 by reason of insanity. State prosecutors tried to prove that this mother of six killed her 15

00:14:45.900 month old because she told investigators her husband was cheating. The voices and the COVID

00:14:52.200 psychosis is a fabrication and an embellished story. The judge didn't buy it. That theory,

00:14:58.500 it doesn't make sense to me that she decided to do all the things that she did, going to all the

00:15:04.380 neighbors, calling her family members, putting the kids in the water, all of it because she was

00:15:09.260 angry due to some perceived infidelity. Her lawyers argued Bland was overcome by the voices

00:15:14.920 in her head and had a COVID-induced psychotic break. Satan is a deceiver. There's so much that 0.88

00:15:20.800 we don't know about COVID. And this was, you know, one of the first cases in the country to go to

00:15:27.060 trial on COVID-ing the defense to murder. Bland spent three and a half years behind bars before

00:15:33.700 being released about a year ago now after a judge cleared her of criminal responsibility in her

00:15:39.480 daughter's death she says she's focused on moving forward just ready to get my life back together

00:15:45.940 my husband and my children just move forward

00:15:50.480 she wants to move forward isn't that nice with her husband and her children uh at least the one 0.75

00:15:58.480 she hasn't killed yet and just on the basis of these interviews all by themselves this woman 1.00

00:16:03.520 deserves life in prison. She's obviously detached from reality right now in the present.

00:16:08.600 But in the eyes of the legal system, she was just temporarily insane when she tried to annihilate 1.00

00:16:13.800 her entire family and murdered her daughter in a bloody bathtub. We're supposed to believe that 0.91

00:16:18.900 she's completely fine now, which even if that were true, shouldn't matter, but it's obviously not 0.97

00:16:27.600 true okay you can't just be so crazy that you kill your own child and then a couple years later

00:16:33.740 you're fine like you got over the flu or something and you can listen to her for 10 seconds and come 1.00

00:16:39.800 to that conclusion now the the lawyers here are obviously scum as well no surprise there her 0.99

00:16:45.680 attorney is a guy named larry handfield who told reporters quote this was covid it's a woman who 0.97

00:16:50.940 served our country for five years living the american dream until covid came she didn't ask

00:16:55.800 for COVID. Yeah, well, her daughter didn't ask for a homicidal, psychotic mother either. 0.99

00:17:04.040 So just totally shameless. But I want to highlight what this judge, Judge De La Oh, 0.50

00:17:09.640 said when he rendered his decision in this case. He said that he simply doesn't buy the idea that

00:17:15.020 this woman would go through all this trouble if she was simply angry at her husband for cheating

00:17:18.960 on her. He thinks there's no way that a scorned woman would possibly go to the neighbors, call

00:17:24.640 her family, drown her daughter, all because she felt that her husband was unfaithful.

00:17:29.620 So put it another way, in Miami-Dade County, if you want to get away scot-free with murdering

00:17:34.640 your family, it's actually very simple. You just have to bother the neighbors for a bit,

00:17:39.500 call your family members beforehand, say a few words about Satan and baptism when the body cams

00:17:44.740 show up, and you're golden. The judge will conclude that you're obviously suffering from

00:17:49.340 a bad case of COVID, and therefore you can murder whoever you want to murder. 0.88

00:17:53.120 Now, of course, all these mental health questions are entirely irrelevant.

00:18:00.020 Whether this woman was truly psychotic or not, whether she had long COVID or not, it doesn't matter. 0.92

00:18:07.460 The fact that she killed her own child by itself is grounds for removing her from society permanently.

00:18:14.780 If a person is so mentally deranged that they allegedly cannot be held responsible for, as in this case, drowning their own child in the bathtub, that is all the more reason why such a person should be removed from society permanently.

00:18:30.920 And if you don't want to think of it as a punishment, don't.

00:18:33.060 You know, if it makes your tummy hurt 0.96

00:18:35.520 to think that we're punishing a mentally ill person, 0.98

00:18:38.620 which like, okay, why can't we punish mentally ill people? 0.96

00:18:42.820 Why does being mentally ill mean 0.99

00:18:44.600 that you're immune from punishment? 0.85

00:18:46.280 Has anyone stopped to question that premise? 0.99

00:18:51.200 Oh, they're mentally ill, we can't punish them. 0.98

00:18:53.320 Why? 0.99

00:18:54.400 Oh, so then you could just do the most evil things imaginable

00:18:57.120 and we're not even allowed to be mad at you about it.

00:19:03.060 But if you don't want to think of it as a punishment, don't.

00:19:04.680 Think of it as a very basic measure of societal self-defense.

00:19:08.760 Sane or insane, people who kill children must be removed from society permanently.

00:19:14.580 No other outcome could possibly be considered just, or for that matter, sane.

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00:21:44.220 case, along with the Ronald Exantis trial that I mentioned earlier, got me interested in doing a

00:21:49.860 deep dive on the insanity defense, which we've talked about a little bit on the show, and how

00:21:55.120 it's become a cancer in our legal system. And my sense, although it's only anecdotal, is that we're

00:21:59.980 seeing a lot more of these criminals claim to be not guilty by reason of insanity, and we're seeing

00:22:05.900 the insanity defense work, even in cases where it clearly shouldn't. There was the infamous

00:22:12.100 Slenderman stabbing in 2014, for example, in which Anissa Ware and Morgan Geyser lured a friend into

00:22:18.880 a wooded area and attempted to kill her as a sacrifice to Slenderman, a fictional character.

00:22:24.340 They stabbed their victim 19 times. Somehow she survived. Both defendants were found not guilty

00:22:29.680 by reason of insanity. Ware was sentenced to 25 years. Geyser was sentenced to 40,

00:22:34.340 with both sentences to be served in a mental institution.

00:22:37.580 And guess what?

00:22:38.560 They were both released in just a few years.

00:22:41.560 They're already out of prison.

00:22:42.440 Ware was released in 2021 to live with her father.

00:22:44.880 Geyser was released last year to live in a group home,

00:22:47.740 which she promptly escaped before being recaptured.

00:22:51.820 These are criminals who should have been spending

00:22:53.740 the rest of their lives in prison at a minimum.

00:22:57.040 But because they were found to be insane,

00:23:00.060 they were never sent to prison.

00:23:01.160 They went to mental institutions that specialize in releasing criminals as early as possible.

00:23:07.820 In another case, 21-year-old Cora Vides lured a former classmate to her home and stabbed her repeatedly in the neck.

00:23:14.860 It was a premeditated attempted murder.

00:23:16.860 She told her classmate to lie on the bed so that she could teach her a meditation technique before she nearly decapitated her.

00:23:23.960 Guess what? The jury found that she was depressed at the time of the stabbing, so therefore, it's not her fault.

00:23:29.760 Her sentence for doing this?

00:23:31.260 Six months in a hospital.

00:23:34.460 And normally this is as far as any discussion of the insanity defense goes.

00:23:38.640 You'll hear about a series of outrageous cases where the law is clearly being abused,

00:23:42.880 but you're not able to draw any larger conclusions because it's all anecdotal.

00:23:48.160 Well, as it turns out, this is a deliberate quirk of the system.

00:23:51.420 There is no database, national, state-by-state, or anything,

00:23:55.200 that tracks how often the insanity defense is used or how often it's successful. Outside of

00:24:01.840 random studies by researchers, no one is tracking any important statistics on this subject, on the

00:24:08.160 insanity defense. And on top of that, even in states where the insanity defense has technically

00:24:12.620 been abolished, it's still being used in practice. Take Montana, for instance. It's true the defendants

00:24:18.240 can no longer plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but they are able to claim as part of

00:24:23.560 a regular not guilty plea that they lack the state of mind necessary to commit the crime

00:24:28.720 due to some mental illness. So just kind of a roundabout way of arguing the same thing.

00:24:33.820 And that said, if you get clever with the data, you'll be able to find some proxies for this

00:24:38.460 information. A few years ago, the Department of Health and Human Services in Virginia put out a

00:24:41.980 study that took a close look at state psychiatric facilities, the places where criminals typically

00:24:47.020 go when they're found not guilty by reason of insanity. In the absence of asylums, this is where

00:24:52.120 we're sending these people. This was a long-running study from 1999 to 2016, and during that period, 0.99

00:24:57.640 the researchers tracked the number of so-called forensic patients in state mental hospitals

00:25:01.980 over the years. A forensic patient is basically a patient who was ordered to go to the facility

00:25:06.320 as part of a sentence, or for an evaluation in a criminal trial, or because they're considered

00:25:11.220 potentially incompetent to stand trial. And here's what they found, quote,

00:25:16.240 states that are experiencing dramatic pressures accommodating forensic patients describe operating

00:25:20.440 at full capacity. Overall national trend lines show a 76% increase in the number of forensic

00:25:26.060 patients in state hospitals from 1999 to 2014, though the trend is not consistent across all

00:25:31.880 states. So this is a massive jump, obviously. The number of forensic patients in psychiatric

00:25:37.480 facilities has increased dramatically in just 15 years, and this data is only current as of 2014.

00:25:43.300 We can assume that, based on this trend line, as well as all the stories we're talking about,

00:25:47.800 that number has only continued to increase. But it's important to point out, as this chart

00:25:53.060 demonstrates, that much of the growth is occurring in one state, which is California. It's actually

00:25:59.500 hard to interpret this graph because California skews the results so much. Beginning at the turn

00:26:05.160 of the century, without ever holding any kind of vote or referendum on the topic, California vastly

00:26:10.260 expanded the use of the insanity defense, as well as rulings where criminals were deemed incompetent

00:26:14.840 to stand trial. Instead of sending criminals to prison, they began putting them in hospitals.

00:26:21.240 But this was not only happening in California. This chart helps to see that other states

00:26:26.760 increased their use of psychiatric facilities quite a bit as well. Florida, Georgia, Minnesota,

00:26:32.900 Nebraska, Nevada, Texas, Wisconsin all saw very large increases in their forensic populations at

00:26:38.600 state hospitals during this period. In general, the states with the highest percentage of forensic

00:26:43.120 patients, as you expect, were left-wing. Quote, seven states had an emission rate of forensic

00:26:48.600 patients that exceeded 15 per 100,000. District of Columbia, Hawaii, Virginia, California,

00:26:55.120 Washington, Colorado, and Ohio. And keep in mind, this massive increase in forensic patients is

00:27:02.000 taking place while the overall patient population at these hospitals is declining. Now, it used to

00:27:07.100 be that older patients, particularly patients with dementia, would receive care at these facilities,

00:27:11.460 but increasingly they're getting care at home or in a specialized assisted living center.

00:27:16.620 They've moved out of the state hospitals and they've been replaced in large number

00:27:20.500 by criminals. From 1999 to 2005, as for patients who were not guilty by reason of insanity,

00:27:27.520 quote, the total percent change calculations suggest there was a 9% increase between 1999

00:27:32.940 and 2005, a 3% decrease between 2005 and 2014, and a 6% increase between 1999 and 2014.

00:27:43.640 This is not a perfect statistic since it doesn't count states that abolish the insanity

00:27:47.640 defense, although they still have it in practice, as we discussed.

00:27:51.420 Additionally, as the report finds, from 1999 to 2014 across all 27 states, there was a

00:27:56.380 72% increase in the number of IST, or Incompetent to Stand Trial, patients receiving competency

00:28:01.760 restoration services on a given census day. Now, what's important to understand here is that as a

00:28:10.640 matter of policy, many of these hospitals simply can't keep these so-called IST or incompetent

00:28:16.900 to stand trial patients in their custody for very long for that purpose. Quote, 19 states indicated

00:28:22.880 they cannot hold an IST patient for competency restoration services for longer than two years.

00:28:27.480 11 of these 19 states cannot hold an ISD patient for longer than one year.

00:28:31.940 Six states reported that an ISD patient could be committed for competency restoration services for up to three years or more.

00:28:37.560 Four states indicated that the maximum length of time that an ISD patient can be committed can vary depending on the sentence length or the case itself.

00:28:44.340 Nine states reported having no specific limit on the length of time that an ISD patient could be committed for competency restoration services at a state psychiatric hospital.

00:28:53.880 Now, after this period has expired, only patients who are deemed unrestorable can continue to remain in the hospital indefinitely.

00:29:01.480 But there's a massive problem here because the hospitals are out of room.

00:29:05.520 State mental facilities in 35 of 46 states are experiencing shortages of psychiatric hospital beds, according to this report.

00:29:12.660 And 26 states reported a shortage of beds for forensic status patients committed by the courts for evaluation or long-term stays.

00:29:20.620 Now, this is not simply a matter of logistics. State-run hospitals that run out of room

00:29:26.000 that can't handle patients the court sends to them are held in contempt of court. They have

00:29:32.260 to pay fines. Administrators can lose their jobs. In fact, as this HHS report notes, 20 out of 37

00:29:38.280 states that participated in the survey reported that they had been threatened with or held in

00:29:43.020 contempt. And 11 of those states specifically said that the length of time the patients were

00:29:47.960 waiting for admission to the hospital was a major factor in their contempt charges. So you see how

00:29:53.800 this works. A criminal will stab someone. He'll say that he's mentally ill. A judge will send him

00:29:59.920 to a hospital, which has to determine whether he's competent to stand trial and whether he was insane

00:30:04.520 when he committed the crime. All this is totally arbitrary. But the hospital doesn't have the

00:30:10.220 capacity to make that determination because they don't have hospital beds. And also the whole

00:30:16.080 process for determining whether someone was insane when they did something is totally fake.

00:30:20.120 I mean, it's all just completely fake. And even if they do eventually determine that this person

00:30:25.140 is crazy, they can't keep them in the hospital because they have no room. So guess what happens

00:30:30.320 next? Well, you guessed it. The state hospital is held in contempt and the criminals are freed.

00:30:35.220 That's what just happened in Oregon. This is a report from just a few weeks ago. Watch.

00:30:41.240 In Oregon, a person charged with a crime but considered too mentally ill to aid with their own defense

00:30:47.100 is often sent to the Oregon State Hospital for treatment.

00:30:51.180 A new order from a federal judge will limit that option to the most serious cases,

00:30:56.780 felonies like assault, murder and rape.

00:30:58.660 It means defendants facing less severe charges now have fewer options

00:31:03.580 and they could be released from custody before getting treatment.

00:31:07.200 If there's somebody who is mentally unstable and needs the help and the assistance of the state hospital, we should be giving that to them.

00:31:16.760 Kevin Cameron is a Marion County commissioner. The state hospital is in his district.

00:31:21.740 He's one of multiple county leaders who are critical of the judge's ruling.

00:31:25.860 That causes a public safety problem, and it also is a challenge for those people.

00:31:32.240 I mean, we shouldn't be, it's inhumane to be sending people out on the street that don't belong out there.

00:31:39.760 The order also restricts extensions of a patient's stay at the state hospital,

00:31:44.420 meaning violent offenders could be released after six months.

00:31:48.040 The goal, get Oregon back in compliance with the federal order 0.77

00:31:51.620 requiring mentally ill defendants to move from a jail to the state hospital within seven days.

00:31:57.300 We know that every day a person with mental illness that is so severe they can't help their lawyer in their case

00:32:03.680 spends in jail is a day when they're at risk of suicide, they're at risk of harm from others, they decompensate.

00:32:11.500 It's been a decades-long problem in Oregon.

00:32:14.480 The state was found in contempt last year.

00:32:17.540 Oregon has since racked up more than $3.7 million in fines due to noncompliance.

00:32:23.360 the judge wrote, defendants, the Oregon Health Authority, are likely to achieve compliance

00:32:28.680 considerably sooner with these remedial measures in effect. So it really has everything. You've

00:32:33.960 got the black left-wing judge who's letting everybody out of prison. You've got the white 0.96

00:32:38.020 leftist woman with the glasses who said it's the humane thing to do. You've got the old white guy 0.71

00:32:42.880 trying desperately in vain to convince everybody that it's a bad idea to spring violent lunatics 0.99

00:32:47.300 on the public. But in Oregon, he is outvoted. Rather than throw these criminals in prison,

00:32:53.060 which is supposedly the worst-case scenario, a human rights violation, Oregon has decided to

00:32:59.540 release them onto the streets. Because who cares about the human rights of the law-abiding members

00:33:06.860 of your community? Who cares about them? So the murderous lunatics have a human right to

00:33:13.260 be free, but the law-abiding citizens of the community have no right to be free from 0.93

00:33:19.780 being brutalized and killed by those very same lunatics. Okay. Now, what's interesting is that 0.87

00:33:26.080 not too long ago when we had asylums, prison was considered the humane option. Bellevue was 0.95

00:33:32.560 notorious. They'd cut your brain up if you were too disorderly. Meanwhile, the Pennhurst Asylum 0.94

00:33:37.280 in Pennsylvania was so creepy and disturbing that they've turned it into a haunted house

00:33:41.580 in the present day. Now, if patients weren't insane when they walked into the asylum,

00:33:48.500 they often lost their minds before they left, and they certainly would have a tough time in there.

00:33:53.160 But towards the end of the 20th century, in our quest to be more humane, we shut down this asylum

00:33:58.540 and every other asylum like it. As the New York Times wrote in 1984, quote, the first lawsuit in

00:34:04.120 the nation to argue that the mentally retarded have a constitutional right to living quarters

00:34:07.880 and education in their home communities has been settled after 10 years with state officials

00:34:12.020 agreeing to shut down the Penhurst Center for the Mentally Retarded. This makes possible a new life 0.99

00:34:16.660 for retarded people across eastern Pennsylvania, across the Commonwealth, and across the country, 0.85

00:34:21.000 said Thomas K. Gilhoul, an attorney for the state chapter of the Association for Retarded Citizens,

00:34:27.680 an organization that was instrumental in the negotiations. They freed all the retarded people, 1.00

00:34:32.240 and one of them is now on the Supreme Court, Katonja Brown Jackson. So that's kind of an 1.00

00:34:36.600 inspiring story, but it seemed like a good idea to people at the time. We gave the retarded people 1.00

00:34:41.240 a better quality of life. But one of the many second order effects of this decision is that 0.98

00:34:46.720 without the horror of asylums looming in the back of their minds, criminals gained a brand new

00:34:51.960 incentive to make phony insanity pleas. I mean, it used to be that no sane person would plead

00:34:59.340 not guilty by reason of insanity because being sent to an asylum was effectively torture. It

00:35:04.800 was worse than prison. But now that asylums are gone and state hospitals are full, we've created 1.00

00:35:10.800 a very obvious reason for criminals to pretend to be insane. I mean, why not? The existence of

00:35:16.200 asylums guaranteed that insanity pleas were mostly legitimate, because by definition, no sane person

00:35:22.900 would want to go there. The absence of asylums ensured that most insanity pleas are fraudulent.

00:35:30.680 That's also ironic, because at one point, prisons were considered the progressive option. You know,

00:35:35.600 they were certainly more progressive than simply hanging criminals on the spot,

00:35:38.660 which is what we used to do and in many ways was a better system. Now prisons are seen as the worst

00:35:45.020 case scenario in the eyes of the social justice activists. They'll always complain about any

00:35:49.060 deterrent to criminal behavior. And as of 2026, their complaints have been effective. Society has

00:35:55.780 bowed to their demands consistently. That's why we're all conditioned to think that these insanity

00:36:01.200 pleas and this insane 76% increase in the number of forensic patients are all totally normal.

00:36:07.360 They're not, or they shouldn't be. I mean, that's the reality. Insanity as a distinct medical

00:36:13.060 category, actually, is a very new concept. It certainly is not some concept that's as old as

00:36:22.300 civilization, which is a ridiculous claim that I've seen circulating online. Yes, people have

00:36:27.760 behaved in bizarre and evil ways throughout all of history. Roman legal codes address people who

00:36:33.300 are mentally incompetent. That's true. But the idea that these people have a mental illness 1.00

00:36:37.480 or that they just need to take a few pills and spend a few nights in a hospital

00:36:41.580 is indeed very new. I mean, the rules that our courts use to determine insanity were established

00:36:47.900 around 1840, less than two centuries ago. Before that, we were capable of identifying

00:36:53.200 demons when we saw them. We also understood that evil people exist too.

00:37:00.260 Evil people do things that seem insane to people who are not evil.

00:37:05.960 We could identify evil people without pretending that COVID was controlling their minds,

00:37:10.120 and we could dispense with them accordingly.

00:37:12.920 One of the major lessons of the latest Supreme Court ruling

00:37:15.860 is that we have drifted very far from the legal system that our founders envisioned. 0.93

00:37:22.920 We've treated illegal aliens, as well as the allegedly insane,

00:37:26.660 in ways that don't remotely align with the fundamental principles of the Constitution. 0.99

00:37:31.260 These are all new inventions.

00:37:33.940 And despite what you may be hearing today,

00:37:36.580 they don't derive from any legitimacy from precedent or from Supreme Court rulings.

00:37:43.460 We are a weaker and more dangerous country for having allowed this madness to continue for so long.

00:37:50.760 But we can reverse a significant amount of this decline just as quickly as it began.

00:37:54.820 with one three-word policy that's long overdue, 0.97

00:37:59.500 reopen the asylums. 0.75

00:38:01.720 Give the criminals something to fear 0.92

00:38:03.720 that's infinitely worse than prison.

00:38:06.580 And at that point, the most evil among us

00:38:08.840 will have no more incentive to lie.

00:38:11.460 They can finally admit what they are.

00:38:14.520 And in turn, while ignoring all the inevitable wailing

00:38:17.880 from the social justice ladies with the big glasses,

00:38:21.000 we can deal with them accordingly. 1.00

00:38:24.820 That'll do it for the show today.

00:38:26.980 Thanks for watching.

00:38:27.580 Thanks for listening.

00:38:28.260 Talk to you tomorrow.

00:38:29.800 Have a great day.

00:38:30.780 Godspeed.

00:38:37.280 We have a terror warning in Northern Virginia. 1.00

00:38:40.480 Radical Islam has designs openly on the West. 0.91

00:38:42.740 The FBI thwarted a terror plot on New Year's Eve. 1.00

00:38:45.480 Violence attack over the Halloween weekend in Michigan.

00:38:48.700 Protests on college campuses showing no signs of stopping.

00:38:54.820 Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!

00:39:24.820 To be continued...

00:39:54.820 You

The Matt Walsh Show - June 30, 2026

Ep. 1804 - We Investigated The INSANE Loophole That Lets Killers Walk Free

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