Whose welfare comes first: society's or John Hinckley's?

So, John Hinckley Jr., his lawyers and a gaggle of psychiatrists and psychologists think he's ready to take unsupervised trips from the psychiatric hospital where he's been a patient since 1982, when a jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity in the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan.
How about this? Instead of Hinckley making unsupervised trips to stay overnight at the home of his parents, he can pick the home of any of his lawyers or doctors for his overnighters. We wonder how well they'd sleep.
In point of fact, no one should be sleeping very well if John Hinckley is out and about. Even though, we'll acknowledge, that Hinckley's unsupervised trips would be the most supervised trips any mental patient ever took. That's because whether Hinckley is with a hospital escort or not, the Secret Service is always there. They tend to be like that when they know that someone who has tried to kill a president is going for a walk.
What he'd like
Hinckley wants U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman to let him travel unescorted from St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington to the Williamsburg, Va., area three hours away to see his parents. Hinckley wants to make the trip 10 times, five for overnight visits.
One of Hinckley's lawyers described unsupervised visits as the next step in Hinckley's mental health treatment. Levine said that any other patient at a psychiatric hospital would have been allowed such trips by now.
"Is he going to be judged not by the law but by the identity of the victims of his crime?" Levine asked during his opening statement. "There is not a single basis to justify the rejection of this proposal."
Levine is right. There is not a single reason to reject this travel proposal. There are four.
Hinckley, of course, is most immediately identified as the man who tried to kill President Reagan. But note that Levine said victims. Three other people were on the receiving end of Hinckley's pistol. The first to fall was James S. Brady, the president's press secretary. Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy jumped between Hinckley and President Reagan and was hit in the stomach. Washington, D.C., police officer Tom Delahanty was wounded in the neck.
The last of six shots struck the president as he was being pushed into his limousine by a Secret Service agent. The only reason it wasn't fatal was that the exploding bullet Hinckley used didn't explode.
The president, the agent and the police officer recovered from their painful wounds. Brady was never the same, suffering brain damage and lifelong paralysis.
A jury found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity after learning that he decided to kill the president as a way of ingratiating himself with actress Jodie Foster. On the face of it, that's insane. But regardless of his irrational motivation, Hinckley executed his attack with cold calculation, down to obtaining and using the exploding bullets.
More than an impulse
And it's worth noting that President Reagan was not Hinckley's first target. He stalked President Jimmy Carter during the 1979 presidential campaign and was arrested for possession of firearms at the Nashville airport, where he had followed Carter to a campaign stop.
Perhaps if his family and doctors had reacted more aggressively then, Hinckley would not have shot another president a year and a half later. But he convinced them that he was fine.
Hinckley is no longer his parents responsibility. He is the responsibility of the court, and the court has a responsibility to society that outweighs a presumed responsibility to make Hinckley feel better about his life. He fooled his doctors once; he shouldn't get to do so again.
Psychologist Sidney Binks testified that Hinckley's mental illness is in "full remission."
He said Hinckley's supervised trips away from the hospital -- to go to bowling alleys, the National Theater, dinner with his parents and shopping malls -- have been uneventful but have improved his mood at the hospital.
"They've been very therapeutic," Binks said, "He smiles more."
We have to wonder if James Brady has days that good.