The foundation issued a statement Wednesday condemning John Hinckley’s release from a psychiatric hospital. John Hinckley Jr shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981, trying to kill him to impress actress Jodie Foster.
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One of the judge’s stipulations: Hinckley can not give press interviews.
Reagan, who had emergency surgery after the shooting but was back to work within a month, died in 2004 at age 93.
Numerous restrictions attached to Hinckley’s temporary release will remain in place.
Hinckley is to carry a GPS-enabled cellphone whenever he is away from his mother’s home, but the judge said there is no need to install a tracking device on any vehicle he may drive.
On a bright note: He’ll still be getting psychotherapy every month.
The court order requires that Hinckley “shall have no contact whatsoever” with specific individuals, including actress Jodie Foster. According to court records, many of his attempts to do volunteer work have been rebuffed, although he has volunteered at a church and a local mental hospital.
An hour before he pulled his gun on the president outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, Hinckley penned a letter to Foster, writing that he would abandon “this idea of getting Reagan in a second if I could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life with you, whether it be in total obscurity or whatever”.
The Department of Justice will keep an eye on Hinckley, and presumably so will the Secret Service, but the conditions placed on his release are hardly onerous.
But he did engage in a few instances of deceptive behavior while on leave, and just 18 months ago, with regard to one of those instances, a psychiatrist testifying for the government described Hinckley as exhibiting a “sense of entitlement and a disregard for the rules”.
Hinckley has been a psychiatric patient at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., for decades.
Doctors have said for years that the would-be assassin is no longer plagued by mental illness.
“I think it’s terribly sad and wrong”, Patti Davis, a daughter of Reagan, tells the Times. The judge also allowed him to spend more time, unsupervised, outside his mother’s subdivision, for periods of up to four hours. After having received the “maximum benefits possible in the in-patient setting” – a phrase sure to rankle the victims and their families – Friedman says it’s time to let Hinckley out on supervised “convalescent leave”. His hobbies include painting and playing the guitar and he has recently developed an interest in photography.
“It made me feel awkward and uncomfortable”, he said. In July 2011, prosecutors said, Hinckley was supposed to go see a movie and instead went to a bookstore, where Secret Service agents saw him looking at shelves that contained books about Reagan and the assassination attempt, though he didn’t pick any of them up.
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“The Court finds that any symptoms of clinical depression or psychosis would develop gradually and would likely be detectable” by his Williamsburg treatment team and by St. Elizabeths during his monthly visits there, the judge wrote.
