Not Viable by Reason of Iniquity

Paper Summary:

A paper which calls for an abolishment of insanity defense in the legal systems due to it being antiquated and illogical. The author of the paper argues that the insanity defense poses two antithetical schools of thought " psychiatry and the law " against each other and they do not complement each other: rather, they devour one another. The paper uses several court cases to illustrate its argument.

From the Paper:

"The insanity defense extrapolates this argument and allows a man who points a gun at another man, pulls the trigger and kills him to go free if lawyers and psychiatrists can convince the jury that he was insane at the time of the act. The accused need not be insane during the trial or even immediately after the act; he only need be insane during the act itself. It all comes down to deciphering what was in the accused's head at a particular moment in the past. "These defendants go free because some lawyers and some psychiatrists are willing to manipulate juries and the criminal justice system precisely in those areas where judgment is most difficult: where judgment is based upon imagining what was in a person's mind when he committed an act." (Winslade 2) The jury must decide in some states only one thing: did he do it? This determination will encompass both whether - in a traditional sense - he did it, and also whether he didn't do it because at the time he performed the crime, he was insane and therefore didn't legally do anything. He didn't have actus reus. Other states use a bifurcated system in which the fact-finder determines whether " insanity aside " the man is guilty, and then whether he was insane at the time. If he was insane at the time, he was not guilty."

More papers on Not Viable by Reason of Iniquity:

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• Poem Review # 88969 : "'The Road Not Taken' by Robert Frost"

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