The man who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan will continue to live under a number of restrictions when he leaves a Washington mental hospital next month.
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Among the judge’s restrictions, Hinckley must meet monthly with St. Elizabeths’ doctors in Washington and attend regular sessions with therapists and a psychiatrist in Williamsburg. A judge ruled the would-be assassin poses no threat to society.
Hinckley began to identify with the film’s main character, Travis Bickle, who planned to assassinate a presidential candidate, and spent several years trying to make contact with Foster, who was a student at Yale University in CT.
Hinckley must remain within 50 miles of his mother’s home, and can not travel to any area where a current or former president, vice president or member of Congress is known to be.
And since 2006, Hinckley has completed more than 80 unsupervised visits to Williamsburg, the judge said.
On March 30, 1981, Hinkley attempted to shoot President Reagan while he and his entourage were exiting the Washington Hilton Hotel.
Reagan, who had emergency surgery after the shooting but was back to work within a month, died in 2004 at age 93. Brady survived but lived the rest of his life in a wheelchair. On Wednesday, Friedman said John Hinckley Jr. could be released from St. Elizabeths, a government-run psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., as soon as next week.
The court order further says Hinckley must participate in “structured activities” in Williamsburg, such as volunteer positions or paid employment approved by his doctors. And she said attempting to kill the president is a special kind of crime. “He did try to shoot a president”.
For the past decade, Hinckley has marched steadily toward freedom.
“For purposes of review, here are a few other things Hinckley was doing at Saint Elizabeths: Writing to mass murderers Ted Bundy and Charles Manson”.
“It could be a grave mistake to try to force fit him into that community with his 90-year-old mother”, Mann told NPR before the ruling.
His wife, Mary Margaret Campbell, added: “I don’t think a lot of these mental illness issues go away”.
McCarthy, now the police chief of the Chicago suburb of Orland Park, says he is a bit perturbed he didn’t get a notification of the judge’s decision and hopes it’s the right one.
A letter published today details how the release of Hinckley could come about by August 5 as long as the patient met “monitoring conditions”.
But Justice Department prosecutors have been leery.
So they want to be able to monitor his location or his whereabouts via Global Positioning System. On a home visit years ago, he said he was going to the movies – and instead slipped into a bookstore and ended up near a shelf crammed with books on the assassination attempt. “And will he really be a different person?”
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“Mr. Hinckley, by all accounts, has shown no signs of psychotic symptoms, delusional thinking, or any violent tendencies”, the judge wrote in his opinion.
