In a bid to make Jared Lee Loughner competent to stand trial, a federal judge in San Diego has ruled that prison officials can forcibly medicate him with anti-psychotic drugs. The federal prison in Springfield, Missouri where he's being held had made the request because they feel Loughner is a danger, and lawyers for his defense filed a request that no medications be given to him without a judge's approval. But now what, they're going to make him a little less insane so he can stand before a jury and try to prove he was too insane to know what he was doing?

As discussed by legal experts over the months that have passed since the tragic January shooting in Tucson, insanity defenses became a lot harder to pull off after John Hinckley Jr., and after the subsequent change in the law. The defense now has to prove by clear and convincing evidence that the defendant did not understand that anything he was doing was wrong. As Barry Boss, a former public defender for mentally ill clients, told NPR, "That's a very difficult thing to establish because even in the most delusional people, there's often some evidence that they did things to avoid getting caught."