INSANITY PLEA

Insanity Plea



Insanity Plea

Introduction

The insanity defense has a prominent place in the mythology of criminal law. Because it seems to permit factually guilty defendants to escape both punishment and institutionalization, some imagine it as the “perfect defense.” In fact, the defense has been invoked in a dizzying variety of contexts and, at times, has proven highly successful. Successful or not, the insanity defense has always been accompanied by a storm of controversy, in part because it is often most successful in cases where the defendant's basic claim is that honor, revenge, or tragic circumstance - not mental illness in its more prosaic forms - compelled the criminal act. Indeed, the insanity defense is often (though not always) raised in circumstances where the defendant asserts that his or her conduct should not be punished because, under the circumstances, it was justified. Given that the insanity defense is considered paradigmatic of excuse defenses, this function, as a sort of justification defense, is enigmatic (Hurst & Foley, 2005). The legal defense by reason of insanity is primarily used in criminal prosecutions and is based on the assumption that at the time of the crime, the defendant was not sound of mind, and therefore, was incapable of appreciating the nature of the crime and differentiating right from wrong behavior. Allowing such typology of defense is based on the principle that civilized societies do not punish people who do not know what they are doing or are incapable of controlling their conduct.

Discussion and Analysis

Although the insanity defense continues to be regularly invoked, it is far less robust than it once was. Indeed, for a variety of reasons, the insanity defense has largely lost its standing as a distinct - or even a coherent - legal claim. Most importantly, the law governing the insanity defense has coalesced around a psycho-medical model of insanity predicated upon the existence of a clinical, diagnosable mental disease or defect (Hurst & Foley, 2005). insanity claims, like insanity claims in general that lack this psycho-medical foundation, rarely reach the jury. Although, as we will see, courts have struggled to draw reliable parameters around this concept by holding insanity claims to the same psycho-medical threshold as regular insanity claims, courts have largely rejected attempts to establish insanity as a distinct type of affirmative defense that might arise from causes or conditions that would not suffice for a regular insanity claim (Vidmar, 2002). At the same time, if courts treat the basic requirements of the insanity defense as a subset of regular insanity claims, the law governing the legal competency of criminal defendants to stand trial effectively reduces all insanity claims to insanity claims. Because only legally competent defendants may stand trial (or enter valid pleas), the only type of insanity claim a defendant logically can assert is that he or she was legally insane at the time the crime was committed but not insane at present (Alexander & Link, 2003). Of course, the legal standards defining competence to stand trial and those defining ...