PARALLEL OBSCENITIES

By William M. DiMascio
   Executive Director

In a gin and drug fogged haze twenty-two years ago, the warped mind of George Emil Banks seemed to work flawlessly: he snapped a thirty-round clip into a nearby assault rifle and began one the most gruesome rampages in Pennsylvania history. Firing at point blank range, he methodically killed three young girlfriends who lived with him at his house in Wilkes-Barre as well as the four babies they had borne him and another young daughter of one of the women.

He then changed his blood-spattered clothes and moved deliberately, with the AR-15 in hand, to the door. Two neighbors had been aroused by the gunfire and were trying to get away. Banks caught them at their car and dropped them in a hail of gunfire; one somehow survived, the other did not. Then, he drove to the home of a former girlfriend and killed her, her mother, her son by Banks and another young boy, a visiting nephew. The bloodbath ended there; Banks surrendered to police hours later at another location.

A panel of jurors from Pittsburgh sat in Luzerne County Court for the trial and wasted no time in handling down the verdict that put Banks on death row.

In the movie Apocalypse Now, there is a scene in which the deranged Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, speaks about the horrors of war and the strength of soldiers who use "moral terror" as a weapon. He recalls how these soldiers chopped off the arms of little children who had been inoculated against polio by American troops. The incident clearly moved the renegade colonel. He observes: "You have to have men… who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling...without passion...without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us."

George Banks' judgment and passion certainly caused horror. He told arresting officers that he wanted to spare his children from the harm of racial hatred that he, as the son of a black father and a white mother, experienced during his life. Considering the circumstances, however, that kind of rhetoric has no nobility. Banks was able to do what he did because of his total lack of judgment and feelings. He was at least as sick as the fictional madman, Colonel Kurtz.

The psychiatrist at Banks' trial said as much: delusional, psychotic, suicidal. We used to care about such things. People as mentally disturbed as Banks used to be considered too sick to be held accountable for their actions. We sent them to mental hospitals, not prisons. But two things happened to change all that: first, we did away with the mental hospitals, and, second, John Hinkley was found not guilty of attempted murder of Ronald Reagan by reason of insanity. The combination of events could not have been worse.

Large mental hospitals were thought to be horrid facilities, so policymakers in the 60s and 70s sought to "deinstitutionalize" mentally ill men and women by providing a network of community mental health facilities. But the community centers never caught on. In the years leading up to the '90s, some 300,000 patients were released from mental hospitals and more than 280,000 of them wound up in jails or prisons. Today, state prisons hold three times as many men and women with mental illnesses as the remaining mental hospitals, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In contrast to the placid way the public accepted the closing of mental hospitals, the Hinkley verdict touched off a furor as state after state made changes that limited the insanity defense. Utah, Montana and Idaho abolished the defense altogether.

Up until a few days before the killings, Banks had been a tower guard at SCI Camp Hill. He talked to co-workers about committing mass killings, preparing his children for wars and killing himself. Prison officials eventually get wind of his rants, put him on extended sick leave and scheduled a psychiatric evaluation that was scheduled to take place four days after the shootings.

At the trial psychiatrists for the defense and prosecution agreed that Banks was mentally ill but disagreed over his ability to distinguish right from wrong, which is the crux of an insanity defense. Everyone who is insane suffers from mental illness, but not everyone who is mentally ill is insane.

Banks refused to cooperate with his defense lawyers in preparing an insanity defense. He contended he was innocent and told the jurors that the murders were part of a police conspiracy to frame him. His unsuccessful appeals so far have focused primarily on procedural matters.

Since arriving on death row, Banks has been diagnosed as suffering from a variety of mental disorders, including paranoid schizophrenia, depression, schizoaffective disorder and personality disorders. One psychiatrist who has reviewed the case, Richard Dudley, reported: "Mr. Banks has an extensive history of psychiatric hospitalizations, commitments and treatments during the course of his incarceration. The records of those hospitalizations provide insight into the chronic nature of his mental illness."

In what may be the final irony in Banks' tortured life, the state Supreme Court has ordered the Luzerne County Court to determine if he is competent enough to be executed. Dr. Dudley, for one, has concluded that Banks is incompetent.

The Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution forbids the execution of anyone who is "unaware of the punishment they are about to suffer and why they are to suffer it." Without such knowledge, our legal system contends, retribution cannot be served.

The bizarre and gruesome details of Banks' deadly rampage render him a totally unsympathetic figure. Only someone as demented as the fictional Colonel Kurtz could find anything admirable in what he did.

On the other hand, the legal hair-splitting over the extent of Banks' mental incapacitation gives rise to yet another, almost parallel, obscenity. Like the well-oiled action of an automatic rifle, our legal system locks in place the arguments that will permit us to extract retribution at the point of a needle. In the same warped way that Banks thought he was protecting his children, we strive to execute in the name of restoring order to our society, of balancing the scales of justice.

It chills the senses to think that the passionate and judgment-less actions of one demented soul might lead us all down the path of such passion-less and judgment-filled ruin.