<div id="subtitle">NYC therapist's meat cleaver slaying highlights difficulties of insanity defense bids</div><div><p>David Tarloff lives in a deeply troubled inner world.</p><p>He was diagnosed as schizophrenic and hospitalized more than a dozen times before hacking a Manhattan psychologist to death with a meat cleaver. He has called himself the Messiah and was known to wander his apartment building half-clothed asking neighbors for money.</p><p>The 41-year-old Tarloff sat glassy-eyed in a courtroom last month after psychiatrists said he was mentally fit to stand trial on murder charges, though still prone to delusions.</p><p>His lawyer is pursuing a rare insanity defense in a case that highlights how the legal system tends to hold even severely mentally ill people accountable for answering criminal charges.</p><p>"Underlying our criminal justice system, there's this sense of personal accountability and responsibility. ... We're hesitant to relieve people of responsibility," said Richard E. Redding, a professor at Orange, Calif.-based Chapman University School of Law who has written on mental disorders and the law.</p><p>It wasn't clear that Tarloff — who sometimes refused to speak to his lawyer — ever would be considered competent for trial in the February 2008 slaying of Kathryn Faughey. He was sent to a state hospital a year ago for indefinite treatment before psychiatrists declared him fit for trial this fall. He is due for three days of further psychiatric examinations this week.</p><p>But the vast majority of people initially found unfit eventually are deemed competent, often after getting medication, Redding said.</p><p>The finding means Tarloff can understand such basics as the charges and his lawyer's role. His lawyer, Bryan Konoski, believes he has a strong bid for an insanity defense, which hinges on Tarloff's mental state at the time of the crime.</p><p>"Everything, about even how the crime took place, just screams insanity," Konoski said. "He had a thought process behind it, but it's an insane thought process."</p><p>Tarloff's disease emerged while he was a college student. He was hospitalized for the first time at 23. By 40, he was a bizarre and sometimes combative figure who despaired over his mother's move to a nursing home a few years before.</p><p>Eleven days before the slaying, he was arrested on charges of punching a security guard at a Queens hospital where his mother was being treated. A psychiatrist decided he didn't need further treatment, and he was released.</p><p>On Feb. 12, 2008, Tarloff set out to rob Dr. Kent Shinbach — his psychiatrist during his first hospitalization in 1991 — for money to whisk his mother out of the state, Tarloff later told police. He believed God had approved his plan, according to his lawyer.</p><p>Tarloff found Shinbach's office mate, Faughey, instead and slashed her 15 times. Then he attacked Shinbach and stole $90 from him when the psychiatrist tried to rescue her.</p><p>Tarloff later told his father he didn't know what had happened, police said.</p><p>But Faughey's family notes that Tarloff navigated the city and avoided detection for four days after the attack. Investigators ultimately matched his palm prints with some at the crime scene.</p><p>"I have a hard time believing he was completely nuts," one of Faughey's brothers, Mike, said last month.</p><p>Shinbach and Manhattan prosecutors declined to comment on the case.</p><p>While insanity defenses are a staple of crime dramas, they're uncommon in real life, offered for less than 1 percent of felonies nationwide and successful only about 20 percent of the time, Redding said.</p><p>The standards vary by state but generally require showing more than a serious psychiatric disorder. In many states, including New York, defendants must prove they didn't understand what they were doing or couldn't tell it was wrong.</p><p>Juries often are skeptical about the defendant's condition or struggle to draw a line between "mad and bad," Redding said.</p><p>In one noted case, a jury rejected an insanity defense for Andrew Goldstein, a schizophrenic who pushed a woman in front of a Manhattan subway train in 1999. Jurors later said they agreed he was mentally ill but felt he acted intentionally.</p><p>But some successful insanity defenses are notorious.</p><p>The defense worked for Lorena Bobbit, a Virginia woman who cut off her husband's penis in 1993, saying he was abusive. Some criticized the verdict as condoning crime in the name of compassion.</p><p>Congress and states around the country toughened laws after John Hinckley Jr.'s acquittal by reason of insanity in the 1981 shooting of President Ronald Reagan.</p><p>Some eliminated an alternative standard that allowed an insanity defense for conduct defendants knew was wrong but couldn't control.</p><p>Advocates for psychiatric patients rue that trend, saying narrower standards don't allow for the complexities of mental illness.</p><p>"We've never really figured out, as a society, how to deal with these kind of cases," said Ron Honberg, legal affairs director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.</p><p>Tarloff faces life in prison if convicted. If found not guilty because of insanity, he'll be held in a mental institution until deemed fit for release, if ever.</p><p>(This version CORRECTS time of statement by Faughey's brother to last month, not this month.)</p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=62441045&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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