So guilty they're innocent.

A STRANGE new twist is appearing in criminal law. Famous defendants are trying to use their own guilt to prove their innocence: a sort of reverse character defense.

The pioneering verdict here was the acquittal of John Hinckley for the attempted murder of Ronald Reagan on grounds of insanity. Hinckley's (and, incidentally, Mike Tyson's) lawyer, Vincent Fuller, brilliantly invented a legal loophole. It was quite clear that Hinckley had known that he was doing, knew it was wrong as well as illegal, and had planned the act carefully. But shooting a President to impress an actress was undeniably a flaky act. Fuller argued that the law required the state to prove not only that Hinckley had done the deed (which was not in question), but that he was sane--beyond a reasonable doubt. Nobody is sane beyond a reasonable doubt, except Reagan himself.

How far can this logic be stretched? We may find out in the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee anthropophagite. Dahmer's lawyer argues that his cannibal-murders are themselves proof of his innocence: only an insane man would do such things. That sort of thinking has come to sound plausible, but its obvious terminus is summed up well by Charles Krauthammer: "It is absurb to permit the heinousness of a crime to become self-acquitting. That sets up a perverse standard: the more terrible the crime, the crazier, therefore the less culpable the criminal. The man who commits incomprehensible torture is acquitted. The father who steals bread to feed his children is convicted."

To which it must now be added that incomprenhensible torture has become more common in America than stealing bread to feed children. The mind shrinks even from extending empathy to such acts as Dahmer's. The same is true of many less bizarre atrocities, like the random killings and gang rapes that are everyday occurences in our cities. These don't strike us as mere extensions of our ordinary temptations to revenge and cruelty, but as something beyond words--as the witches in Macbeth say, "a deed without a name." Each atrocity seems uniquely evil; but why are there so many of them?

We don't know, except that what we call "society" is less inclusive than we thought. A disturbing number of people are now spiritually outside it and willing to do whatever they can get away with, reveling in sins that for most of us aren't even temptations. The rap group Geto Boys performs a new ditty celebrating the imagined rape, murder, and posthumous rape of a white woman who pleads for her life. Respectable opinion pauses, is briefly shocked, then moves on to more palatable topics, shrugging helplessly because censorship is now the ultimate "obscenity," and there is nothing to be done. In the meantime, another pop group arrives seeking fame by breaking the next taboo--an increasingly difficult psycho-sexual feat--and more poison is pumped into our unresisting bloodstream.

How can society cope with this amazing animus in our culture? It's futile to write off the criminals as insane. Most of them know what they're doing. Even Dahmer had enough sense to hide his deeds: that should be evidence enough of sanity for the law. But the law and society are suffering from an enervated inability to test the utility of political principles against their consequences in real life and real death. It is a quieter form of insanity--but perhaps no less deadly in the long run.