Death Attempt

Hinckley survives a suicide try

This time, John Hinckley was resolved that a death would occur. He had failed to kill President Reagan on a Washington sidewalk last March, and he had failed to kill himself two months later, in a North Carolina prison, by taking an overdose of painkillers. In the stockade at Fort Meade, Md., last week, Hinckley jammed the lock to his cell with a piece of cracker-box cardboard. Then he stood on a chair, knotted one sleeve of an Army field jacket around his neck and the other to an iron window bar and, as U.S. marshals shouted at him and struggled vainly to open the door, stepped off the chair. Hinckley, 26, hung for several minutes before a frantic marshal could climb an exterior wall and reach through a window to cut him loose from outside. For the next half-hour Hinckley lay on his cell floor, blue-faced and convulsive for lack of oxygen, before firemen using a hydraulic bolt cutter could get through the cell's bars. Again the loser had been unsuccessful: two days later Hinckley was in satisfactory condition in the base hospital, watching TV. But the possibility that he had suffered brain damage was not ruled out. Says a Justice Department spokesman: "It is too soon to assess if his mental abilities will be affected."

According to Hinckley's parents, the suicide attempt was no surprise: they say they had warned federal authorities two days earlier that their son urgently needed counseling. Said an angry John Hinckley Sr.: "They told me it wasn't necessary, that it could wait. He has been constantly interrogated for seven months. Anyone would be desperate after going through all that." Replied a Justice official: "He is getting adequate [psychiatric] treatment."

By coincidence, two days after the suicide attempt, a federal district court ruled in favor of two Hinckley defense motions. Judge Barrington Parker said that the suspect's Constitutional rights were twice violated by the Government: first, Hinckley just after his arrest, when federal officials continued questioning him even after Hinckley asked for a lawyer, and again in July, when guards seized Hinckley's diaries from his cell. The illegally obtained evidence, Parker ruled, cannot be used to prove Hinckley guilty of the March shooting, the particulars of which the defense has already admitted. But Parker left unclear whether he would allow the evidence to be used to buttress the prosecution's contention that Hinckley was sane at the time of the shooting. His trial is scheduled to begin Jan. 4.

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