Lessons from a forgotten presidential assassination attempt

While the Secret Service reels over the security lapses that contributed to the assassination attempt at a Trump rally on July 13, most Americans have forgotten the previous attempt to assassinate a president.

And no, it wasn’t Ronald Reagan. It was Bill Clinton.

Looking back on that case, which I participated in as the law clerk for the federal judge overseeing the trial of the attempted assassin, it is astounding how much we’ve come to tolerate gun violence and how little Congress is willing to do about it.

The attempted assassination of President Bill Clinton occurred on Oct. 29, 1994. A 26-year-old man named Francisco Martin Duran, dressed in a trench coat, shot a semi-automatic rifle through the fence surrounding the White House lawn on Pennsylvania Ave. He was aiming at a group of men wearing business suits who were touring the grounds. One of them was fashion designer Dennis Basso, who with his salt-and-pepper hair resembled Clinton.

Shortly after Duran fired over 27 rounds toward the White House, three onlookers tackled him until the Secret Service arrived. The president was inside watching football.

Duran was indicted and convicted for attempted murder of the president, along with other charges, and sentenced to 40 years in prison. The case was legally historic because Duran’s lawyers tried (unsuccessfully) to prove that he was insane under a legal standard that was passed by Congress in the wake of John Hinckley’s attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan.

Hinckley had shot Reagan on March 30, 1981, and a jury later found him not guilty on 13 charges by reason of insanity. He was sent to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital instead of federal prison, then permanently released in 2016. Reagan, Press Secretary James Brady and two others were all injured. Brady suffered brain damage so severe that when he died in 2014, his death was ruled a homicide.

Prior to the Hinckley case, nearly all states and federal courts across the country put the burden of proving a defendant’s sanity on the prosecution. After the Hinckley verdict, Congress passed a law in 1986 declaring it “an affirmative defense to a prosecution under any federal statute that, at the time of the commission of the acts constituting the offense, the defendant, as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, was unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts.”

By making insanity an affirmative defense, Congress shifted the burden to defendants to prove their mental illness by “clear and convincing evidence,” a standard that is lower than the prosecution’s burden of proof, “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Duran’s legal team couldn’t muster enough proof to meet it.

Duran claimed he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and believed he was tasked with eradicating an alien “mist” that had enveloped the White House for over 100 years. Previously, he had been dishonorably discharged from the Army after an altercation outside a bowling alley prompted him to drive his car into someone. He was also treated for alcoholism.

But prosecutors produced handwritten notes recovered from Duran’s pickup that referred to an attack on President Clinton, ultimately persuading the jury that his claim of mental illness was false.

Having watched the evidence unfold first-hand, I came to the same conclusion that the jury did: Duran was not criminally insane. This conclusion seems, so far, the most likely case for the Trump shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, as well.

Crooks had reportedly conducted a number of dubious online searches on topics including President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, President Joe Biden, Michigan high school shooter Ethan Crumbley (whose negligent parents were both convicted of attempted murder) and the upcoming Democratic National Convention. But so far, there has been no public information indicating signs of diagnosed mental illness, which reportedly afflicts only 25 percent of mass shooters in public spaces.

These facts have not stopped partisan politics from infecting the public discussion around what should be a renewed conversation about gun violence in America. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), for example, posted on X that Crooks was “a madman inspired by the rhetoric of the radical left.”

This kind of framing of would-be assassins as “madmen” fuels the false narrative that mental illness, not guns, is responsible for gun violence in America. Guns killed nearly 49,000 people in the U.S. in 2021, the most recent year for which there is complete data — a 23 percent increase since 2019.

Somewhat ironically, approximately six weeks prior to his attempted assassination, Clinton signed into law the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, which banned the manufacture for civilian use of certain semi-automatic firearms and ammunition magazines. Deaths from mass shootings fell substantially, in hindsight by approximately 70 percent, and immediately rose when the law expired in 2004.

Despite Trump’s popularity within the Republican Party, which controls the House of Representatives, today’s Congress has done nothing legislatively to respond to the attack on their candidate for president. Voters from should take note when they go to the polls in November.

Kimberly Wehle is author of “How to Read the Constitution — and Why.” Her forthcoming book, “Pardon Power: How the Pardon System Works — and Why,” is out in September.