586
Opinion of the Court
lengthy period." United States v. Fisher, 10 F. 3d 115, 122 (CA3 1993), cert. pending, No. 93-7000. An accurate instruction about the consequences of an NGI verdict, however, would give no such assurance. Under the IDRA, a postverdict hearing must be held within 40 days to determine whether the defendant should be released immediately into society or hospitalized. See 18 U. S. C. §§ 4243(c), (d). Thus, the only mandatory period of confinement for an insanity acquittee is the period between the verdict and the hearing. Instead of encouraging a juror to return an NGI verdict, as Shannon predicts, such information might have the opposite effect—that is, a juror might vote to convict in order to eliminate the possibility that a dangerous defendant could be released after 40 days or less.11 Whether the instruction works to the advantage or disadvantage of a defendant is, of course, somewhat beside the point. Our central concern here is that the inevitable result of such an instruction would be to draw the jury's attention toward the very thing—the possible consequences of its verdict— it should ignore.
Moreover, Shannon offers us no principled way to limit the availability of instructions detailing the consequences of a verdict to cases in which an NGI defense is raised. Jurors may be as unfamiliar with other aspects of the criminal sentencing process as they are with NGI verdicts. But, as a general matter, jurors are not informed of mandatory minimum or maximum sentences, nor are they instructed regard-11 As the court below observed, "a jury could assume that due to overcrowded mental hospitals, strapped social services budgets, sympathetic judges, etc., a defendant will be released after only a short period of commitment. To combat the prospect of early release, the jury could simply opt to find him guilty." 981 F. 2d, at 763, n. 6. Indeed, depending upon the content of the instruction, information regarding the consequences of an NGI verdict could influence a juror's decision in countless—and unpredictable—ways. See, e. g., Fisher, supra, at 121-122, and n. 7 (describing various scenarios in which sentencing information could induce compromise verdicts in the NGI context).
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