NORFOLK, Virginia (AP) – John Hinckley Jr., who shot and wounded President Ronald Reagan in 1981, was released from judicial oversight on Wednesday, officially ending decades of oversight by legal and mental health professionals.
“After 41 years, 2 months and 15 days, FREEDOM IS BEST !!!” he wrote on Twitter shortly after 12 o’clock in the afternoon.
All restrictions were expected to be lifted by the end of September. U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman in Washington said he would release Hinckley on June 15 if he remained mentally stable in the community in Virginia, where he has lived since 2016.
Hinckley, who was acquitted of insanity, had spent decades in a psychiatric hospital in Washington.
Hinckley’s freedom will include a concert – he plays guitar and sings – in Brooklyn, New York, which is scheduled for July. He has already won nearly 30,000 followers on Twitter and YouTube in recent months as the judge loosened Hinckley’s restrictions before completely repealing them all.
But the white-haired 67-year-old is far from the nickname he came up with after he shot and wounded the 40th president of the United States – and several others – in front of a hotel in Washington. Today, historians say Hinckley is at best a quiz question and someone who inadvertently helped build the Reagan legend and inspired a push for tighter gun control.
“If Hinckley had managed to kill Reagan, then he would have been a major historical figure,” Hag Brands, a Reagan historian and biographer, wrote in an email to the Associated Press. “As it is, he is a deluded soul that history has forgotten.
Barbara A. Perry, professor and director of presidential research at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, said Hinckley “may be a matter of danger.”
But its impact remains tangible in Reagan’s legacy.
“To make the president himself so badly hurt and come back from it – it actually made Ronald Reagan a legend, that he became … like the movie hero he was,” Perry said.
Reagan showed grace and humor in the face of death, Perry said. After he was shot, the president told emergency physicians he hoped they were all Republicans. He later joked with his wife, Nancy, that he regretted “forgetting to hide.”
When the president first spoke to Congress after the shooting, he looked “a little weaker, but still a healthy cowboy who is Ronald Reagan,” Perry said.
The assassination attempt paralyzed Reagan spokesman James Brady, who died in 2014.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed the Brady Bill, which required a five-day waiting period for gun purchases and inspections of prospective buyers. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Brady Center for the Prevention of Gun Violence are named after Brady and his wife, Sarah.
Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and Washington police officer Thomas Delahanti were also injured in the shooting.
Last year, McCarthy told the AP that he did not “have very good Christian thoughts” about Hinckley.
“But in any case, I hope they are right,” McCarthy, then 72, said of Hinckley’s impending release. “Because this man’s actions could have changed the course of history.”
Hinckley is 25 years old and suffers from acute psychosis when he shoots Reagan and the others. When jurors found him not guilty of insanity, they said he needed treatment, not a lifetime in prison. He was ordered to live at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington.
In the 2000s, Hinckley began visiting his parents’ home in a gated community in Williamsburg. A 2016 court order allows him to live with his mother full-time, albeit under various restrictions, after experts said his mental illness had been in remission for decades.
Hinckley’s mother died in July. He signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment in the area last year and began living there with his cat Theo, according to court documents.
Stephen J. Morse, a professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, told the AP last year that acquitting Hinckley of insanity meant “he is not guilty of these horrific things that happened and cannot be punished.”
“If he had not tried to assassinate President Reagan, this man would have been released many years ago,” Morse said.
But the Presidential Foundation and the Ronald Reagan Institute said in a statement last year that they were “saddened” by the court’s plan, saying “we believe John Hinckley is still a threat to others.”
Friedman, the federal judge supervising Hinckley’s case, said on June 1 that Hinckley had shown no signs of active mental illness since the mid-1980s and had shown no violent behavior or interest in guns.
He noted that government lawyers and Hinckley have been fighting for years over whether Hinckley should be given more freedom. But government lawyers ultimately did not oppose Hinckley’s unconditional release.
“It took us a long time to get here,” he said, adding that there was now unanimous agreement: “This is the time to let John Hinckley go on with his life, so we will.”
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