Hinckley Denied Unescorted Visits

The man who tried to kill President Ronald Reagan in 1981 cannot leave the mental hospital for unescorted visits with his family because “he has deceived those treating him in ways too numerous to recount” and may still be dangerous, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

The judge, June Green of U.S. District Court, cited the opinion of a government psychiatrist who testified that the behavior of the would-be assassin, John Hinckley Jr., toward the hospital’s chief pharmacist was similar to his one-time obsession with the actress Jodie Foster.

Testimony at Hinckley’s trial indicated that he had hoped to draw attention to himself by the shooting, and thus impress the actress, to whom he had dedicated poems and love songs and whom he had once stalked with a loaded handgun on the campus of Yale University.

The psychiatrist, Dr. Raymond Patterson, testified at a hearing last week that Hinckley has shown “some improvement in some areas” but that “some very core personality issues remain unchanged.”