GUILTY OF MENTAL ILLNESS?

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. - The phone roused Terry Clark from sleep.
"Flagstaff Police Department," a voice announced, asking to speak
with Mr. Clark. Terry nudged Dave and handed over the receiver. "My
son's truck?" she heard her husband say. "Gentry?"

Gentry was the oldest of their three children. Had he been in a
wreck? Terry crawled from bed and headed for the front door to see if
her son's Toyota pickup was in the drive. She stepped out onto the
porch, then stopped dead in her tracks.

In the dim glow of dawn, she could see that Gentry's truck was gone.
Where it should have been, men in helmets stood clutching guns aimed
at Terry's head. "Get against the garage!" one shouted.

At first, investigators told Terry only that a policeman had been shot.

She would hear a name, Officer Jeff Moritz, and discover he was
called to their neighborhood after residents reported a pickup
circling, blaring loud music. The policeman had pulled the truck over
and called in the license plate, then radioed dispatch once more:
"999. I've been hit. 999. I've been hit."

The pickup - her son's pickup - sat abandoned next to the sidewalk
where, Terry soon learned, the police officer had died.

She realized then that her son was the prime suspect. Not Gentry, who
had been at home in bed.

Her middle son. Eric.

The one who had been a star football player and a good student with dreams.

The one who just two months earlier called his own mother and father aliens.

Defining A Criminal

The victim of the June 21, 2000, shooting was the only police officer
ever killed in the line of duty in this mountain community north of Phoenix.

The accused was a 17-year-old high school senior who had a history of
marijuana use and had been arrested two months earlier for drunken
driving and drug possession after police found two dozen hits of LSD
in his car.

A portrait emerged of a drug-crazed teen. But as the facts slowly
surfaced, so did a different picture of Eric Michael Clark - that of
a decent boy who had descended into a world of delusion, the
terrifying existence that is schizophrenia.

It took three years for Eric Clark to be found competent to stand
trial and participate in his defense. When the case proceeded, his
attorneys pushed for a verdict of "guilty except insane." Instead, a
judge found him guilty of first-degree, intentional murder and
sentenced him to life in prison.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court is to take up the case of Clark
v. Arizona and the issue of just how difficult states can make it for
criminal defendants to prove insanity.

It's the first time the court has dealt with a direct constitutional
challenge to the insanity defense since lawmakers around the country
imposed new restrictions following John Hinckley's acquittal by
reason of insanity in the 1981 shooting of President Reagan.

The issue is determining under what circumstances absolution of a
criminal act is warranted.

"There are some cases," says Richard Bonnie, director of the
Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at the University of
Virginia, "where a person was so mentally disturbed at the time of
the offense that it would be inhumane and morally objectionable to
convict and punish them."

Signs Of A Problem

Terry Clark wonders, now, when it all started.

Did it begin with Eric's fear of drinking tap water? It was December
1998, and a house fire forced the family to live temporarily in an
apartment. Eric, then 16, worried about lead poisoning and would only
drink bottled water.

Always low-key, Eric then began to grow moody - exploding one minute,
sobbing the next.

Was that illness or teen angst?

A varsity running back at Flagstaff High, Eric dreamed of becoming a
professional athlete. Then he lost interest in sports.

Terry wondered if Eric was on something, but she'd had him
drug-tested before, and the results were negative. Was it depression?
Anger management? The pieces didn't fit into one neat puzzle, and
Eric's behavior grew more bizarre.

In the fall of 2000, Eric quit school. He became obsessed with Y2K
and charged $1,700 worth of survival gear on his dad's debit card.
When Jan. 1, 2000, came and went, Eric was thrilled and went back to school.

"He's getting better," Terry thought again - until Eric started
mentioning "them."

"They're after me," he'd tell his mother.

That April, in the midst of conversation, Eric referred to his mother
and father as aliens. "If you'd go get some tools," he told them
matter-of-factly, "I'd show you." That same month, Eric was arrested
on drunken driving and drug charges. Authorities decided to postpone
prosecution until Eric turned 18 later in the year.

On June 19, 2000, Eric called his mother an alien again.

"How would you like to be me," he said, "and never know who your real
mother is?"

The next day, Eric seemed better, and he, Terry and Dave went to a
movie together. Afterward, Eric asked if he could stay to watch
another film. He hugged his folks, and said goodbye.

Fair Trials, State Laws

Investigators surmise that sometime after 1:30 a.m. on June 21, 2000,
Eric made his way home, sneaked into his brother Gentry's bedroom,
took his keys and left in Gentry's truck.

What happened after that, and why, no one can know for certain; Eric
has never talked about it. At the 2003 trial, prosecutors and defense
attorneys presented different scenarios.

Both sides, and their mental health experts, agreed that Eric
suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was mentally ill.

But legal insanity is another matter; Arizona law spells out its
qualified use as a defense.

"A person may be found guilty except insane if, at the time of the
commission of the criminal act, the person was afflicted with a
mental disease or defect of such severity that the person did not
know the criminal act was wrong," the law states.

The prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General David Powell, argued Eric
did know. One witness testified that weeks before the shooting, Eric
mouthed off about his disdain for cops and wanting to shoot them.
Powell's theory was Eric lured Moritz to the scene by playing loud
music until residents reported him.

Defense attorneys insisted Eric's psychosis was so severe he was
incapable of hatching such a plan. They noted that after the
shooting, Eric called his parents from jail and explained that
Flagstaff was a "platinum city" inhabited by 50,000 aliens. He told
them: "The only thing that will stop aliens are bullets."

In his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, defense attorney David
Goldberg asserts that Arizona law is so restrictive that it violates
a mentally ill defendant's right to a fair trial. For one, he says,
Arizona law prohibited the trial court from considering Eric's mental
illness in weighing whether he intentionally killed a police officer.

Goldberg also contends that the right-wrong test is too narrow in
determining legal insanity. Eric might have known that killing was
wrong in the abstract, Goldberg says, but if he believed Moritz was
an alien, "he didn't understand the nature of what he was doing."

The Supreme Court could establish a more specific definition of legal
insanity or allow for broader discretion in determining when evidence
of mental illness may be considered at trial.

Terry Clark says she doesn't want her son to get "off"; she only
wants him to get the psychiatric care he needs.

"Eric didn't choose to be mentally ill. It chose him," she says. "He
shouldn't be punished for it."