86: The Insanity Defense (is "Not Guilty" worse than being convicted?)

54 years ago on a damp april night in washington dc raymond gregory found shelter in a half-built house after an evening of drinking on april 20th 1971 he had been unemployed for 14 months after losing his job working in a hospital kitchen that night he drunkenly stumbled across an under construction house on 17th street in the southeast of the city and decided to sleep off a hangover there.

One of the builders working on the house called the police the following morning, and he was caught trying to leave through an upstairs window shortly after 8 a.m.

Although nothing was stolen, the 36-year-old was charged with destruction of property, burglary, and possession of a dangerous weapon, a small penknife in his pocket.

I was drinking at the time.

I just wanted somewhere to lay down at," he explained.

It was the latest miscalculation in a troubled life.

Born in DC in 1935, the fifth of six children, Mr. Gregory had an unhappy childhood and began drinking at an early age.

No job would last long, and he had recently lost contact with his girlfriend and daughter, but life was about to get a whole lot worse.

Gregory told the lawyer assigned to defend him against three charges that he had been hearing voices for at least a couple of years, but hadn't acted on anything they'd said.

His lawyer recommended he enter a not guilty by reason of insanity plea, or NGRI, which was accepted by the prosecutor and the court.

I went along with it, Gregory said.

He said you won't be locked up no longer than six months.

That's what he told me.

Once in hospital, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and put on three antipsychotic medications.

He responded well to treatment and within four years of his insanity plea in March 1972, Mr. Gregory's doctor at St. Elizabeth's had concluded he had recovered sufficiently for him to recommend antipsychotics.

an unconditional release.

Doctors would recommend that he be freed on at least two future occasions.

Their advice, however, would not be followed by the hospital.

At St. Elizabeth's, Gregory had entered a world in which the normal rules of medicine and of natural justice no longer seemed to apply.

Had a jury convicted him of the crimes he was charged for, he would have likely spent no more than two or three years in jail.

Gregory was not found guilty of any offense, but over four decades would pass before he finally won his freedom.

For a man now aged 80, that's been more than half his lifetime.

Battling lung cancer and diabetes, he was finally granted an unconditional release in December of 2015.

I've missed out on everything, he said in an interview.

I've missed out on my whole life.

But U.S. lawyers and law professors say that there are hundreds of cases like Gregory's where minor nonviolent offenders entered NGRI pleas on the assurance that they would be in and out of a mental institution in a matter of months.

In 2015, the year Gregory was finally released, there were 81 NGRI patients at St. Elizabeth's with a median average stay of of 12 years, two months, down from 13 years and 11 months in 2013.

Of those 81 NGRI detainees, around one-fifth are thought to be in for low-level crimes.

In a sizable number of these cases, often dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, people have languished in secure psychiatric units for decades, far, far longer than the time they would have spent in prison for the crimes they were accused of.

And still to this day in 2026, Gregory is not alone.