Hinckley bids to be allowed trips home

John Hinckley Jr, 48, has been a patient at St Elizabeth’s Hospital since he was acquitted by reason of insanity in the shooting of Mr Reagan and three others outside a Washington hotel in March 1981. Hinckley said he shot the president to impress actress Jodie Foster.

Hinckley has been allowed to take supervised day trips from the hospital since a federal appeals court ruling in 1999. Yesterday, he was scheduled to appear in court to ask US District Court Judge Paul L Friedman to allow him have unsupervised visits with his parents away from the hospital. Senior US District Judge June L. Green cancelled a hearing on a similar motion three years ago after prosecutors said Hinckley had a “continued interest in violently themed books and music”.

In the latest motion, filed in March but only recently unsealed, Hinckley seeks 10 unsupervised visits, five of them overnight trips, with his parents at their home in Virginia.

Such trips are an “appropriate next step” in Hinckley’s treatment, lawyer Barry W Levine wrote.

“It is undisputed that Mr Hinckley’s psychosis and depression have been in full remission and that he has shown no symptoms thereof for over a decade,” Mr Levine said in the filings.

Federal prosecutors objected, citing Hinckley’s “history of deception and violence”. They argued in their filings that Hinckley at one point had 57 pictures of Foster in his room, wrote to serial killer Ted Bundy before Bundy’s execution in 1989, and had praised Adolf Hitler and mass murderer Charles Manson.

Mr Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, said the family strongly opposes Hinckley’s latest request. “I don’t believe for a second that John Hinckley is no longer mentally ill,” Davis wrote recently in Newsweek magazine. “If John Hinckley is granted the right to walk off hospital grounds with no supervision, we should all ask very serious questions about our legal system.”