582
Opinion of the Court
dence that he is entitled to release, 18 U. S. C. § 4243(d); under the District of Columbia scheme, an acquittee, regardless of the character of his offense, need only meet the preponderance standard, D. C. Code Ann. § 24-301(k)(3). The IDRA provides that an acquittee, once committed, may be released when he no longer presents a substantial risk of harm to others or to their property, 18 U. S. C. § 4243(f); an acquittee under the District of Columbia system may be released from commitment when he "will not in the reasonable future be dangerous to himself or others," D. C. Code Ann. § 24-301(e). Finally, in the IDRA, Congress rejected the broad test for insanity that had been utilized under the District of Columbia provision,7 and instead adopted a more restrictive formulation under which a person is deemed insane if he is unable "to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts." 18 U. S. C. § 17(a). We believe that these significant differences between the IDRA and D. C. Code Ann. § 24-301 render the canon upon which Shannon relies inapplicable in this case.8
7 Under the District of Columbia system, the courts had defined insanity as either the lack of substantial capacity to conform one's conduct to the requirements of the law or the lack of substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of one's acts. See Brawner, 471 F. 2d, at 973-995.
8 In addition, we note that the canon upon which Shannon relies is a canon of statutory construction. It stems from the notion that a court, in interpreting "borrowed" statutory language, should apply the same construction to that language that was placed upon it by the courts in the jurisdiction from which it was borrowed. In this case, however, the court in the jurisdiction from which the statutory text was supposedly borrowed—that is, the Lyles court—did not purport to construe the language of the District of Columbia Code provision; rather, in holding that jurors should be informed of the consequences of an NGI verdict, the court appears to have relied on its supervisory power over the Federal District Courts in the District of Columbia. Cf. infra, at 584. Thus, we conclude that the canon is also inapplicable in this case because there was no "known and settled construction," Capital Traction Co. v. Hof, 174 U. S. 1, 36 (1899), of the statute that Congress could have adopted by virtue of borrowing language from the District of Columbia statutory scheme.
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