Aside from the verdict from the Hinckley trial, the public’s view on the insanity defense is not altogether accurate. There’s a misconception that criminals who use this type of reasoning as a plea can evade punishment. When it comes to the use of the insanity defense, only about one percent of criminals use this type of justification. By using the insanity defense, the criminal is admitting they are guilty of the crime however they are requesting a not guilty verdict based on the state of mind they were in at the time of the crime. This can get tricky for a defendant because if not proven mentally ill, they will be found guilty and usually endure a harsher sentencing for the crime.
In this speech I am going to tell you about the types of insanity defense that are used in court cases, the process that goes into verifying a criminals sanity, and the issues that come about after a plea is entered. Now I’m going to explain what insanity is and the different types associate with it. The insanity defense plea as defined in law journals is a defense that’s asserted by the accused in a criminal prosecution as a way to avoid liability for a 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. Cognitive insanity is the most common variation of an insanity defense that goes through the court system. This is where the defendant during the time of the crime suffered from a mental disease that impaired his/her psychological ability to see the wrongfulness of the act they committed.
Yet, why does one get away with it and another does not? Depending on the severity of their illness and the intensity of the crime, individuals with a mental illness who commit a crime should not be convicted, but they should be hospitalized if they are a threat to society. The question that most people ask when proposed this question is: who is considered mentally ill? To clarify, there are two prevailing legal tests to determine whether or not a defendant is legally insane. According to Terry Lenamon, expert Criminal Trial Attorney, the first, and most popular, is the “M’Naghten test.” Lenamon says, “Under M’Naghten, the determining factor is whether or not the defendant was (1) able to understand what he (or she) was doing at the time of the crime due to some “defect of reason or disease of the mind” or, (2) if he (or she) was aware of what they were doing, that he (or she) nevertheless failed to comprehend or understand that what they were doing was wrong” (Lenamon).
After medical professionals deem a person mentally ill, the court room can then proceed to conclude an insanity defense. Both understand that claiming a mental illness can be sufficient enough to somewhat relieve the burden of guilt in a court of law. The diagnosis of mental illness does not automatically deem innocence and the person usually becomes institutionalized, therefore treated, but not punished for their uncontrollable actions. In a courtroom, the idea an insanity defense created a right-wrong test which was established with the M’Naghten Rule in the case Queen v. M'Naghten (1843). This test was applied when deciding if a person, at the time of the committing of the act, was ‘laboring under such a defect of reason from disease of the mind as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing or, if he knew
Predicting Dangerousness When judging whether a patient is a danger to themselves the mental health professionals are often called on. They are also asked as part of the legal proceedings to determine whether people should be involuntarily hospitalized or maintained involuntarily in a mental facility. The accuracy of the judgments made by these professionals on predicting the dangerousness of these people is in question. The mental health professionals are not very accurate when it comes to predicting the dangerousness of the people they treat. They are more likely to over predict, in some cases people may be labeled as dangerous when they are not.
Following that Andrea Yates submitted a plea of guilty for reason of insanity. The criminal case a criminal defendant can claim insanity by simply saying that he or she should not be held criminally liable for the damages committed from his particular crime because he was insane at the time of occurrence. Acording to CBS News (2009) "Dr. Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist, testified for the defense that she did not know killing the children was wrong because she was trying to save them from hell.” Now because of the evidence used and the defense of insanity, the cases outcome did not meet very many people’s expectations, to include my own. Many felt that her being sentenced to a mental institute was an injustice at its finest. Acording to CBS News (2009) "No one should believe that she is getting off easy.
This code states that the person is capable for using this defense in the case of mental insanity if the do not have the ability to appreciate the fact that they have committed a crime and what that entails or that they are unable to conform to the moral and legal codes of society. (ALI Moral Penal Code (1962)) In regards to this case, I feel that the defendant did know what he was doing but do to the fact that he was either under the influence of the drugs at the time and dor he was mentally unstable and believed that he was saving her rather than killing her when he committed the crime. The reason that I feel that we can use this defense is the fact that the defendant ranted about aliens and the fact that he was god when the officers went to arrest him. He also kept a journal until he decided the time was right to perform the "saving" of the
Since insanity is defined so arbitrarily, lawyers can protect their clients from their punishments with relative ease by dragging out the legal process for years at a time by using the insanity defense. To be protected with the insanity defense in many states, a criminal must take the M'Naghten test: failure to determine right from wrong deems the criminal insane (Cornell University Law School). Although some argue that people with mental illnesses cannot be held accountable for their actions, the greater concern should be for the overall safety for The United States of America because criminals who plead insanity can be a danger when released, legal definitions of insanity vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, Supreme Court has upheld four states' abolishing of insanity defense, and there is incomplete research on insanity. Shafer !2 Insane criminals who are found not guilty by reason of insanity are sent to mental hospitals to rehabilitate and treat their illness. The problem is that the criminals who are sent to a hospital and become "cured" could be a danger to society.
There are criminals that need help but do not get help there for result in criminal activity. Then there are the criminals that are flat out insane. The correctional stage can be effective; it just depends on the sanity of the
What would life be like if one could get away with illegal actions and weren’t held responsible for their behaviors? What would it be like to have a cold and empty heart that contained a strong lack of empathy towards the people of today’s society? More importantly, what characteristics of a “normal” human mimic ones of a psychopath? Although the majority of psychopaths are immediately put into the category of “crazy”, they share common factors with normal people than one might think. Psychopaths are productive in society, have elements of emotion, and share correlated brain patterns with the “normal” people that are classified as non-psychopathic.