The Insanity Defense

1828 Words8 Pages
Nicole Nixon Ron Davis Judicial Process April 17, 2012 Are You Insane? When you watch crime shows on television you see defense attorneys always use an insanity defense when they go to trial, the insanity defense is one of the most popularly depicted criminal defense strategies in television and film culture. The issue with this depiction is that the public is given a distorted view of who uses the defense and how it is employed. An inanity defense can be defined as “A defense asserted by an accused in a criminal prosecution to avoid liability for the commission of a crime because, at the time of the crime, the person did not appreciate the nature or quality or wrongfulness of the acts.” (Legal Dictionary) The truth about the insanity defense is that only one-percent of criminal defendants employ the defense. Also, criminals rarely “get away with it” by pleading insanity. When the defendant pleads insanity, it means they admit to committing the criminal behavior and is seeking a “not-guilty” verdict on a basis of his state of mind. If the jury does not agree with their defense, then the defendant will be convicted and generally serve a longer sentence than if they did not plead insanity. Most people also believe that the insanity defense is only used for murder, however, sixty to seventy percent of insanity pleas are for crimes other than murder. These crimes range from shoplifting to assault. (Legal Dictionary) There are three major insanity defense, they are the M’Naghten rule, Irresistible impulse, and Durham rule. The M'Naghten rule states: "Every man is to be presumed to be sane, and . . . that to establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party ACCUSED was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act
Open Document