Man Found Not Guilty By Reason of Insanity on Charge of Stealing Necklace in the 1970s Spent Four Decades in a Mental Hospital

For the last six years, a motion to release was assigned to a dead judge

Franklin H. Frye was charged with stealing a $20 necklace in 1970, and he has spent the better part of his life locked up ever since after being found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Mr. Frye was sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington in 1971, part of which houses the criminally insane — including would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley Jr.