The headlines are predictable. A man accused of the attempted murder of three children is declared "fit to stand trial." The public breathes a collective sigh of relief. The legal machine grinds back into gear. We tell ourselves that justice is finally being served because a doctor checked a box and a judge signed a piece of paper.
We are lying to ourselves.
The "fitness to stand trial" metric is one of the most misunderstood, antiquated, and frankly dangerous standards in the modern judicial system. It is a low bar—so low, in fact, that it essentially functions as a legal fiction designed to keep the assembly line of the courts moving. When we celebrate a "fit" verdict in a case involving horrific violence against children, we aren't celebrating justice; we’re celebrating a technicality.
The Low Bar of Legal Competency
To the average person, being "fit" implies a level of mental health or stability. In reality, the legal standard for fitness has almost nothing to do with whether a person is "sane" or even "well."
In most jurisdictions, the criteria are embarrassingly basic. Can the defendant name their lawyer? Do they know what a judge does? Can they distinguish between a "guilty" and "not guilty" plea? If the answer is yes, they are fit. You could believe you are the reincarnation of a 14th-century warlord, but if you understand that the man in the black robe is the judge, you are ready for trial.
This is the first major misconception. Fitness is not a clean bill of health. It is a functional assessment of whether a defendant can participate in their own defense without the trial becoming a total farce. By prioritizing this narrow slice of cognitive function, we ignore the massive, underlying psychological fractures that led to the crime in the first place.
The Revolving Door of Restoration
I have seen the "fitness restoration" process up close. It is not a healing process. It is a "stabilize to litigate" process.
When a defendant is found unfit, they aren't sent to a facility to get "better" in any meaningful sense. They are sent to a high-security psychiatric ward where they are medicated—often forcibly—until they can pass the competency quiz.
Imagine a scenario where a man is so detached from reality that he attacks children. We take that man, put him in a cell, pump him full of antipsychotics until the hallucinations subside just enough for him to memorize the roles of the courtroom staff, and then we drag him back to court.
- The Problem: We are treating the symptoms to facilitate a trial, not addressing the cause.
- The Risk: As soon as the trial ends and the structure of the "restoration" environment vanishes, the stability often vanishes with it.
- The Reality: We are essentially "fixing" a broken car just enough to get it to the junkyard.
The False Promise of the Insanity Defense
The public often conflates fitness with the insanity defense (Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, or NGRI). They assume that if a man is fit to stand trial, he must have been sane when he committed the act.
This is a massive logical leap that the legal system does nothing to correct.
Fitness to stand trial is a snapshot of the defendant’s mind now. The insanity defense is a post-hoc autopsy of the defendant’s mind then. A person can be perfectly fit to stand trial today while having been completely detached from reality during the commission of the crime.
By the time a case like the attempted murder of three children reaches a "fit" declaration, the narrative has already shifted. The media focuses on the defendant’s current demeanor. We see a man sitting quietly in a suit, perhaps appearing "normal" under the influence of heavy medication. We forget the chaos of the event. The "fit" label gives the public a false sense of security that the person they are looking at is a rational actor who made a rational choice to be evil.
The Institutional Cowardice of "Fit"
Why do we cling to this binary of fit/unfit? Because the alternative is terrifying for a bureaucracy.
If we admitted that the fitness standard is a hollow shell, we would have to overhaul how we handle the intersection of mental health and criminal law. We would have to admit that some people are neither "fit" in a traditional sense nor "insane" in a way that fits into a neat legal box.
The "fit" declaration is a tool of institutional convenience. It allows the prosecution to claim a win, the defense to move to the next phase, and the public to believe the system works. But for the victims—in this case, three children who will carry the trauma of an inexplicable attack for the rest of their lives—the "fitness" of their attacker is a red herring.
Why We Ask the Wrong Questions
People often ask, "How could he be fit if he did something so crazy?"
The question itself is flawed. It assumes the law cares about "crazy." It doesn't. The law cares about procedure.
The real question we should be asking is: Why are we using a 19th-century definition of competency to manage 21st-century psychiatric crises?
We have become obsessed with the theater of the trial. We want the confrontation. We want the sentencing. We want the closure. But when that closure is built on the foundation of a "restored" competency that exists only within the vacuum of a heavily medicated state, it is fragile. It is a performance.
The Cost of the Performance
The downside of my contrarian view is obvious: if we raise the bar for fitness, fewer people go to trial. Cases linger in limbo. Victims wait longer for "justice."
But is a trial "justice" if the person in the dock is only "there" because of a chemical cocktail and a three-week cram session on legal terminology?
When we declare a man fit to stand trial for the attempted murder of children, we are not witnessing the triumph of the law. We are witnessing the law’s refusal to deal with the complexity of human psychosis. We are opting for the easy "fit" over the hard truth: that some minds are so broken they cannot be "fixed" for the sake of a court date.
Stop looking at the "fit to stand trial" headline as a victory. Start looking at it as the moment the system decided to stop asking why this happened and start focusing on how to finish the paperwork.
The man in the dock isn't "fit." He's just medicated enough to sit still while we pretend the process works.
