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).
Shafer !1 Mindy Shafer Mrs. Gonder AP Lang, Period 2 21 November 2014 The Issue of Insanity Defense The defense of the insane dates back to the Hammurabi Code, but the issue of using the insanity plea as a tactical defense has become more prevalent today. The proper use of the insanity defense has changed the lives of many people actually suffering with mental illnesses by giving them a chance to heal and make progress on their recovery. The insanity defense, however, can also exempt criminals from their full punishments by sending them to a mental hospital until they are "cured." Even though the insanity defense is easy to define, insanity itself has no real universal legal definition, and the lack of said definition causes problems when convicting criminals. 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.
These tests were used to determine if a defendant was able to decipher what was “good from evil” or “right from wrong”. It wasn’t until the mid-1800’s when the insanity defense changed again with the M’Naghten case. In 1843, M’Naghten shot and killed Edward Drummond, private secretary to Peel, because he thought Drummond was Peel. The defenses argument was that M’Naghten was not guilty because he had mental delusions which caused him to act in the manner that he did. This created the M’Naghten rule, which held that a man is not responsible for his criminal acts, when, because of a “disease of the mind,” he does not know the “nature and quality” of his acts or does not know they are “wrong.” The courts used the M’Naghten rule for some time as the determination factor in cases where the insanity defense was their plea.
Perhaps the most frequently raised argument against capital punishment is that of its cost. Other thoughts on the death penalty are to turn criminals away from committing violent acts. A just argument against the death penalty would be that sentencing an individual to death prevents future crimes by other individuals. However, criminals are not afraid of the death penalty. The chance of a criminal being sentenced to death is very slim.
Would the death penalty be “cruel and unusual” if it typically were given to poor people and minorities, while higher ups or white people were given life sentences for similar crimes? Did such a double standard violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment? Decisions: The Court split 5-4 striking down the death penalty as it was currently applied in state criminal laws. The four newest members of the Burger Court opposed the decision, while the holdovers from the Warren Court comprised a divided majority. “The court held that the death penalty, as it was currently applied in the state criminal codes, violated the 8th Amendment and 14th Amendment rights of condemned persons”.
Juvenile offenders are still very impressionable and interacting with the violent and hardened criminals does not give them the tools to survive in normal society and become productive citizens. My contention has been that if we catch these offenders soon enough we can prevent them from committing more serious crimes. Many states have implemented the death penalty, hoping that it would be a deterrent against crime. I do not think it works either. Many prosecutors use the threat of the death penalty as a way of getting a plea deal to get the offender off the streets.
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.
Capital Punishment and the Deterrence Theory Capital Punishment Deters Crime 11/9/2012 Dr. Ji Seun Sohn Brooke Lee Capital Punishment and the Deterrence Theory: Capital Punishment Deters Crime Jerry Kilgore said in an editorial written for USA Today, “As a former prosecutor, former secretary of public safety and now attorney general, I believe that some crimes are so evil, some criminals so dangerous and some victims so tortured that executing the criminal is appropriate” (Kilgore, 2002). Capital punishment, or commonly referred to as the death penalty, is the most controversial of all of the disciplinary practices. Since it involves taking another human being’s life, this is not at all surprising. Since it is the most severe of all sentences, there have been countless efforts to abolish the death penalty, and in most of the industrialized nations, with the exception of Japan and the United States of America, these efforts have proved effective. In this paper, I will discuss the effect that capital punishment has on deterring criminal activity.
The death penalty is a source of divided opinion and controversy. Capital punishment is the most severe penalty in the US Judicial system. The death penalty is given for the most brutal crimes committed .People have been sentenced to death for many reasons. In America, 2 out of every 3 people support the death penalty. One of the functions of the criminal justice system is to administer a fair and just punishment for the crime committed by the suspect .Most Americans seem to agree with or oppose capital punishment on a case by case basis.
I can’t guarantee we won’t execute innocent people. If someone is convicted and later found innocent you can release him from prison, but not from the realm of their graves.Imagine being ready to die. On January 7, 1988, at 3:19 a.m., Texas began to execute murderer Robert Streetland by pumping lethal drugs into his vein. Before he was pronounced death seven minutes later, the telephone rang in the death chamber. The governor’s office had received word that the united States Supreme Court was ready to consider a new motion of appeal.in the words of a prison spokesman,”the Supreme Court wanted to know where we were in the process,but by then it was too late”.