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The insanity defense, also known as the mental disorder defense, is an affirmative defense by excuse in a criminal case, arguing that the defendant is not responsible for their actions due to an episodic or persistent psychiatric disease at the time of the criminal act. This is contrasted with an excuse of provocation, in which the defendant is responsible, but the responsibility is lessened due to a temporary mental state. It is also contrasted with a finding that a defendant cannot stand trial in a criminal case because a mental disease prevents them from effectively assisting counsel, from a civil finding in trusts and estates where a will is nullified because it was made when a mental disorder prevented a testator from recognizing the natural objects of their bounty, and from involuntary civil commitment to a mental institution, when anyone is found to be gravely disabled or to be a danger to themself or to others.
The M'Naghten rule is any variant of the 1840s jury instruction in a criminal case when there is a defence of insanity:
that every man is to be presumed to be sane, and ... that to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring 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 did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.
The gay panic defense or homosexual advance defence is a legal strategy in which a defendant claims to have acted in a state of violent, temporary insanity, committing assault or murder, because of unwanted same-sex sexual advances, typically from men. A defendant may allege to have found the same-sex sexual advances so offensive or frightening that they were provoked into reacting, were acting in self-defense, were of diminished capacity, or were temporarily insane, and that this circumstance is exculpatory or mitigating.
The D.C. sniper attacks were a series of coordinated shootings that occurred during three weeks in October 2002 in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. Ten people were killed and three others were critically wounded in the Washington Metropolitan Area and along Interstate 95 in Virginia.
John Allen Muhammad was an American convicted murderer from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He, along with his partner and accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo, a native of Kingston, Jamaica, carried out the D.C. sniper attacks of October 2002, killing 10 people. Muhammad and Malvo were arrested in connection with the attacks on October 24, 2002, following tips from alert citizens. Although the actions of the two individuals were classified by the media as psychopathy attributable to serial killer characteristics, whether or not their psychopathy meets this classification or as a spree killer is debated by researchers.
Insanity, madness, lunacy, and craziness are behaviors performed by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns. Insanity can be manifest as violations of societal norms, including a person or persons becoming a danger to themselves or to other people. Conceptually, mental insanity also is associated with the biological phenomenon of contagion as in the case of copycat suicides. In contemporary usage, the term insanity is an informal, un-scientific term denoting "mental instability"; thus, the term insanity defense is the legal definition of mental instability. In medicine, the general term psychosis is used to include the presence either of delusions or of hallucinations or both in a patient; and psychiatric illness is "psychopathology", not mental insanity.
In criminal law, diminished responsibility is a potential defense by excuse by which defendants argue that although they broke the law, they should not be held fully criminally liable for doing so, as their mental functions were "diminished" or impaired.
Lee Boyd Malvo, also known as John Lee Malvo, is a convicted murderer who, along with John Allen Muhammad, committed a series of murders dubbed the Beltway sniper attacks in the Washington Metropolitan Area over a three-week period in October 2002. Malvo was aged 17 during the span of the shootings. Currently, he is serving multiple life sentences at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia, a supermax prison. Muhammad was executed in 2009.
The 1999 Honolulu shootings or the Xerox murders were an incident of mass murder that occurred on November 2, 1999, in a Xerox Corporation building in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States. Service technician Byran Koji Uyesugi shot at eight people; wounding seven fatally. This was the worst mass shooting in the history of Hawaii.
The Criminal Lunatics Act 1800 was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain that required and established a set procedure for the indefinite detention of mentally ill offenders. It was passed through the House of Commons in direct reaction to the trial of James Hadfield, who attempted to assassinate King George III.
Clark v. Arizona, 548 U.S. 735 (2006), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the constitutionality of the insanity defense used by Arizona.
The Old Salisbury Road shooting was a mass shooting in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, committed by Michael Charles Hayes on July 17, 1988. Hayes shot nine people, killing four of them; his subsequent successful use of the insanity defense in courts created a statewide controversy in the early 1990s.
Bigby v. Dretke 402 F.3d 551, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit heard a case appealed from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas on the issue of the instructions given to a jury in death penalty sentencing. The decision took into account the recent United States Supreme Court decisions concerning the relevance of mitigating evidence in sentencing, as in Penry v. Lynaugh.
Settled insanity is defined as a permanent or "settled" condition caused by long-term substance abuse and differs from the temporary state of intoxication. In some United States jurisdictions "settled insanity" can be used as a basis for an insanity defense, even though voluntary intoxication cannot, if the "settled insanity" negates one of the required elements of the crime such as malice aforethought. However, U.S. federal and state courts have differed in their interpretations of when the use of "settled insanity" is acceptable as an insanity defense and also over what is included in the concept of "settled insanity".
An impossibility defense is a criminal defense occasionally used when a defendant is accused of a criminal attempt that failed only because the crime was factually or legally impossible to commit. Factual impossibility is rarely an adequate defense at common law. This is not to be confused with a 'mistake of fact' defence, which may be a defence to a specific intent crime like larceny.
Insanity in English law is a defence to criminal charges based on the idea that the defendant was unable to understand what he was doing, or, that he was unable to understand that what he was doing was wrong.
United States federal laws governing offenders with mental diseases or defects provide for the evaluation and handling of defendants who are suspected of having mental diseases or defects. The laws were completely revamped by the Insanity Defense Reform Act in the wake of the John Hinckley Jr. verdict.
Jared Lee Loughner is an American mass murderer who pled guilty to 19 charges of murder and attempted murder in connection with the January 8, 2011 Tucson shooting, in which he shot and severely injured U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, and killed six people, including Chief U.S. District Court Judge John Roll, Gabe Zimmerman, a member of Giffords' staff, and a 9-year-old girl, Christina-Taylor Green. Loughner shot and injured a total of 13 people, including one man who was injured while subduing him.
James Eagan Holmes is an American mass murderer responsible for the 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting in which he killed 12 people and injured 70 others at a Century 16 movie theater on July 20, 2012. He had no known criminal background before the shooting occurred. Before the shooting, Holmes booby-trapped his apartment with explosives, which were defused one day later by a bomb squad.
Kahler v. Kansas, 589 U.S. ___ (2020), is a case of the United States Supreme Court in which the justices ruled that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution do not require that states adopt the insanity defense in criminal cases that are based on the defendant's ability to recognize right from wrong. It was argued on October 7, 2019 and decided on March 23, 2020.
References
- ↑ Bean, Matt (May 21, 2003). "'Matrix' Makes Its Way into Courtrooms as Defense Strategy". CNN. Retrieved June 9, 2012.
- 1 2 3 4 Schone, Mark (November 9, 2003). "The Matrix Defense". The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on March 24, 2012. Retrieved June 9, 2012.
- ↑ "Profile: Lee Boyd Malvo". BBC. October 10, 2003. Archived from the original on November 12, 2012. Retrieved June 9, 2012.
- ↑ Chalmers, Phil (2009). Inside the Mind of a Teen Killer. Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson. p. 55. ISBN 978-1-59555-152-8.
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