Should a person's mental state determine level of criminal responsibility?

This question is largely based on opinion and your own best views are how you should answer.
While it is natural to feel some sympathy towards defendants who appear frightened by the sentencing and legal consequences of their actions, it is important that we stick to the justice system and reserve the "insanity defense" only for those who are truly mentally incapacitated at the time that the committed their crime - and not just for defense lawyers to work a system and try to make their defendants happy by getting them a lesser sentence, even in the face of obvious complicity or responsibility for the from that has been committed.
It is true that one is behaving well outside of the norm when they push someone to cause a great fall or fire a gun for any reason other than permitted hunting or law enforcement. - but their mental capacity is, unfortunately, had to prove and the burden of proof of insanity , resting on the defendant's legal team, can be hard to establish with evidence that the defendant perpetrated a crome and acted with intent looking overhead.
To be "legally insane," for the purposes of avoiding sentencing and instead receiving jedical treatment, it must be determined that the defendant did not know what they were doing, or that it was wrong, at the time that they committed the crime.
While it has been upheld in some cases, such as the questionable one where Lorena Bobbitt severed her husband's genitalia and pled insanity because of mental abuse, others have been unsuccessful in proving "settled insanity," such as that stemming from substance abuse, intoxication, or personally defects that allegedly could predispose the defendant towards psychosis.
Andrea Yates, who drowned her 5 children in a bathtub, was originally convicted to life in prison in 2002 -a sentence which was later changed to not guilty by reason of insanity in her 2006 retriak on the grounds that she had been suffering from postpartum depression at the time.
In the noteworthy case of mass shooter James Holmes, however, although he was found mentally incompetent to stand trial until he had been stabilized on antipsychotic medications and other psychiatric treatments, he was then deemed fit elti stand trial. Attempts by his defense team to argue that he was not guilty by reason only insanity, because of schizoaffective behavior. Evidence that the crime was premeditated (he had booby-trapped his apartment and had made detailed attack plans in his notebook) and aggravated (he was lying in wait, acted cruelly, and ambushed his victims) caused him to befound guilty and not mentally insane, and sentenced to 12 consecutive life sentences, plus 3,318 years in prison.
The insanity defense is really only used in approximately 1% of court cases, with only a 25% success rate - and of those, 90% of those found not guilty by reason of insanity had been previously diagnosed with a mental illness.
While permissable in the federal court system, it is not available in all 50 states; Idaho, Kansas, Montana, and Utah do not allow it.
It is clear that, in the case of individuals who are truly suffering from mental illnesses that limit their self-control and personal choice when committing these crimes, that they are not receiving the support needed to stabilize their lives and necessarily prevent recrimonalization.
Adjusting our treatment of them and placing stronger limits on what constitutes an successful plea of "not guilty by reason of sanity," to prevent it's abuse, is of utmost importance.


A good question. As with most questions structured in this way, the best approach would be to begin by stipulating that, in most Western jurisdictions, it is accepted that a person's mental state must be taken into account when determining criminal responsibility. Because charges such as murder rely heavily upon intent, if it can be demonstrated that a person did not know what they were doing or did not know that it was wrong, "intent" cannot be proven and a murder conviction becomes impossible. This sort of defense is usually referred to as an "insanity defense." Severely mentally ill people are generally neither helped nor truly "punished" by prison, as they do not understand why they are there; committing these people to psychiatric institutions is more beneficial for both the individual and for society.
Having set out the reasons why the insanity defense is used, then, it might be a good idea to consider the four US states where it has been abolished: Idaho, Kansas, Montana, and Utah. Evidently, these states had a reason for removing the insanity defense as an option. If we look at the reasoning in Idaho, however, we find that the reason for this was that it was felt a jury could not fairly respond to a "defense" admitting that the defendant did kill the victim. Rather than denying that mental instability can alter intent, Idaho has chosen simply to remove the option of "murder" from most cases involving mentally ill patients. These people instead stand trial for lesser charges, and the judge is expected to consider the mitigating factor of the mental state when sentencing. Even in a state where the insanity defense is outlawed, there is still the understanding that mental incapacity removes the possibility of intent being clearly proven in murder cases.
You could then go on to consider the reasons why some people are opposed to the insanity defense on the basis of overuse. For example, if depression is given as a defense in the case of a parent who has murdered her children, this is usually dismissed by the jury for emotional reasons. Depression is, however, recognized by psychiatrists as a cause of irrational and disorderly thinking.
Ultimately, the conclusion you draw must be your own, but I would strongly suggest you investigate further into the reasons why some states have abolished the insanity defense. It is not because they do not believe mental state should determine the level of criminal responsibility.
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/mental-illness-and-the-criminal-justice-system/6535790

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How does Bilbo show leadership and courage in The Hobbit?

Bilbo’s increase in confidence and courage is the defining aspect of his character arc. At the beginning of the novel, he is shut away content in his Hobbit hole, happy to remain separate and coddled from the rest of the world. In the movie, Bilbo chooses to join the dwarves on their quest out of a sense for adventure. In the book, however, Bilbo wants nothing to do with them and only joins because he had been duped into signing a contract. Despite being on the adventure somewhat against his will, Bilbo still proves himself time and again, saving the dwarves from the spiders, the trolls, and a number of other dangers they encounter along the way. Bilbo’s character arc has even been cited as a sort of Christian metaphor for the growth of the soul, though how much Tolkien intended on this front is up for debate. From a thematic standpoint, the ring of invisibility also plays into Bilbo’s brand of bravery. If Hobbits are the overlooked creatures of Middle Earth, then it is noteworthy that...
Read more

In “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion writes that the “lesson” of her story is that “it is distinctly possible to remain too long at the fair.” What does she mean? How does the final section of the essay portray how she came to this understanding, her feelings about it, and the consequences of it?

In this classic essay, Didion describes moving to New York City from her native Sacramento at the age of twenty-one, and, as she freely admits, a somewhat naive twenty-one, her mind, "programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard about New York," with the typical feeling, at that age, that, "nothing like this...has ever happened to anyone before." Intending to stay for only six months, she falls in love with the city. As she says, "I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again." This initial love led her to prolong her residency, since, "I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month." But as the next years roll past, and the "new faces" she encounters...
Read more

Why does the poet say "all the men and women merely players"?

It's one of the most famous lines in literature: All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players . . . This famous saying comes from Shakespeare's play As You Like It, and it's spoken by Jacques. What he's saying here is that simply going about our daily lives is a type of performance. Just like actors on a stage, we all have roles to perform: Daughter. Student. Sister. Captain of the soccer team. The fact that Shakespeare writes that men and women are merely players suggests that the roles are preordained and that a person's choice in being a mother, for example, or a doctor or starting point guard for the Brooklyn Nets is out of their hands. What roles a person performs over the course of their lifetime is up to fate. The notion that "all the world's a stage" has entered pop culture, but within the context of the play, this idea does not sit well with Jacques. He's a pessimist, and the idea that everything is up to fate makes...
Read more