Does she think she can get away with this? Why, she must be insane:
Captain Lisa M. Nowak, the former astronaut and naval officer who confronted a romantic rival at the Orlando airport in February, will plead insanity at her trial on assault and kidnapping charges, according to a notice filed on Tuesday in state circuit court in Orlando.
[. . .]
The psychiatric diagnoses listed in the filing include major depressive disorder, “mixed manic and depressive-like state,” obsessive-compulsive disorder and Asperger's disorder.
The notice states that the filing does not challenge Captain Nowak's competence to stand trial, but “only raises insanity at the time of the offense.”
Wow. That's a whole basket (case) full of disorders. Asperger's disorder seems an odd one to claim for someone who has managed to do everything it takes to be a top-notch astronaut, which would seem to be an "age-appropriate" activity:
. . . affected individuals are characterized by social isolation and eccentric behavior in childhood. There are impairments in two-sided social interaction and non-verbal communication. Though grammatical, their speech is peculiar due to abnormalities of inflection and a repetitive pattern. Clumsiness is prominent both in their articulation and gross motor behavior. They usually have a circumscribed area of interest which usually leaves no space for more age appropriate, common interests. Some examples are cars, trains, French Literature, door knobs, hinges, cappucino, meteorology, astronomy or history.
Of course Nowak was deranged -- look at what she did. But she's trying to get a pre-derangement waiver. What is more likely is that her obsessive romance was the cause of her derangement, not the other way around.
This pushes one of my hot buttons. I've known some people with severe mental illness. They frequently don't get the breaks they deserve because people mistrust them and can't fathom what they're going through ("Just deal with it" is something they hear all the time, which is the equivalent of telling a diabetic to just get over those insulin issues). And they certainly are often poorly treated by the criminal justice system.
One of the reasons for that mistrust is that too many people trot out mental illness as a defense of last resort when they can't think of any other excuse for having behaved badly. So when somebody comes along who legitimately needs help, he or she will often get treated as just one more false claimant trying to scam the system.
