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Investigative reporter, author and former federal agent Chuck Hustmyre has seen the ugly side of life, from A to Z. Here he gets the last word on politics, crime, local government and pop culture.

You know what hacks me off? Legal excuses for murder.

Mass killer Anthony Bell had enough going on upstairs to play lawyer and serve as sole defense counsel at own his murder trial earlier this month. Then when his "I was sleeping with my mother in law so my wife killed her whole family then committed suicide" defense strategy didn't work, he fell back on what murderers have been falling back on for a more than 150 years -- alleged mental problems.

Ever since Daniel McNaughton tried to assassinate British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel in 1843 and killed his secretary by mistake, courts have been making up mental excuses for murderers. McNaughton's claims that he suffered from delusions and that the prime minister, the pope, and a host of others were conspiring against him were enough for a British jury to find him not guilty by reason of insanity.

Then came the "irresistible impulse" rule, the next stop in loony excuse lotto. Based on a 1929 U.S. court decision, the rule granted "a defense for a man whose mental illness caused him to lose self-control."

(Heck, if an irresistible impulse is a legitimate excuse for bad behavior, then I want my record expunged going all the way back to that time in first grade when I ... Sorry, did I say that out loud?)

In 1982, John Hinckley Jr. was given a free room at the funny farm instead of a cell in a federal prison for shooting President Ronald Reagan and severely wounding White House press secretary James Brady. Hinckley's excuse: He obsessed over the movie Taxi Driver and had a thing for actress Jodie Foster. (Though not a murder case, it wasn't for a lack of trying.)

With the public growing increasingly suspicious of killers (and would-be killers) crying insanity, particularly after the Hinckley verdict, courts came up with a new excuse for criminal behavior and a new way for killers to escape their ultimate punishment -- mental retardation.

In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court banned the execution of killers found to be mentally retarded. Suddenly, every convicted killer on death row was drooling in a cup, each trying to under-perform the other on IQ tests.

Convicted Baton Rouge serial killer Derrick Todd Lee claimed he was retarded, even though he was married, had a job, and had been clever enough to baffle police during a two-year killing spree.

Likewise, Shedran Williams claimed mental retardation after he murdered Baton Rouge Police Lt. Vicki Wax and shot two other people at Wal-Mart.

Rogers LaCaze, who sits on death row for shooting New Orleans Police Officer Ronnie Williams in the back of the head at Vietnamese restaurant, now claims to have a room temperature IQ. Yet, he's smart enough to write poetry and send me lengthy letters from prison explaining how the entire case against him was a frame job because he "knew too much" about what was really going on in New Orleans East.

In unsuccessfully representing himself at his own murder trial, convicted killer Anthony Bell set up a double appeal -- an incompetent lawyer and a retarded client. That's a pretty smart strategy if you ask me.

If Lee, Williams, LaCaze or Bell can muster up enough evidence of their own idiocy during their endless state-funded appeals, they'll one day skate on the punishment their jurors ordered for them.

Though not as popular as it once was, insanity is making a comeback. In 2006, Andrea Yates got a second bite at the apple and was found not guilty by reason of insanity for drowning her five children in a bathtub in 2001. Now, instead of spending the rest of her life in prison, like the first jury ordered her to do, Yates can spend her time convincing her doctors that she's sane enough to be released. I hear she wants to be a mother again.

And last week, a state district judge in New Orleans ruled that Bernel Johnson was too insane to stand trial for the brutal murder of New Orleans Police Officer Nicola Cotton, whom he allegedly shot to death with her own gun in January.

I bet Johnson is sane enough to spend the rest of his life in a hospital instead of Angola.

How about we stop coddling killers and start executing them?

What do you say?

Chuck out.

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