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History Of The Insanity Defense

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Killing somebody is not always done with premeditation or intentionality. The killer is not always trying to actively kill someone because he or she is an unbalanced, dangerous person. The killer could have ended the life of someone without actually wanting it. The insanity defense, in that sense, protects a killer from an involuntary purposeful assassination.
It can be applied to several cases, as the one that brought insanity defense into existence. In 1843, Daniel M’Naghten killed an English civil servant while suffering delusions. He did not kill the victim intentionally, so he did not go to prison. Instead, he was held in a mental institution for the rest of his life. This is when the insanity defense was first used. Even today, the outcome is similar. In a similar case, in 1954 in the United States a court found that a defendant cannot be found guilty “if his unlawful act was the product of mental disease or mental defect”. (F.R. p 35-40) …show more content…

It actually involves psychiatric treatment, and even being held in a psychiatric institution, which can be even more traumatic than prison (2016 Insanity Defense). In fact, according to CNN, insanity defense is only used in 1% of the cases, and it is only successful in a fraction of those cases.
The legal backing, and the reason I am against the abolition of insanity defense is because the person who commits the act is not aware of the nature and the quality of the act and does not know that what is being done is wrong. People should not be convicted if they do not understand the concept of

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The next case was the M’Naghten. This case is what started the revolutionary insanity theory. The not guilty by reason of insanity was adopted by the New England first and then the United States. The test consisted of the cognitive test and the volitional test.

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The insanity defence is one of the most controversial topics in the legal system, used by many criminal defendants as an excuse for their unlawful activities. In fact, the Canadian legal system has experienced this in the case of Valentine Shortis, an Irish Immigrant who was convicted of killing two men, injuring one and attempted murder on March 1, 1895. Charged with murder and sentenced to death, Valentine’s Lawyer St. Pierre argued that he suffered from insanity, such as his inability to distinguish right from wrong. There was evidence from Shortis's friends, family, and neighbours who claimed that Shortis was arrogant and mischievous person. According to Friedland, the crown (Macmaster) stated that “he did many eccentric, rash and even

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In the trial of Mr. Smith, there is no question of whether or not he committed the gruesome murder of Mr. Johnson; the question is in the sanity of Mr. Smith at the time the murder was committed. You may be thinking, “Why on Earth would you think Mr. Smith was sane? He killed a man because his eye was creepy!” While Mr. Smith did kill someone for what seems like an absurd reason, this does not make him insane. The legal definition of insanity is “a mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, cannot manage his/her own affairs, or is subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior....

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1. Concepts learned or new to understanding and their importance I found the concept of insanity very interesting and further more I was unware that insanity actually had three different legal meanings even though I have heard of each of these meanings. These three separate meanings are; not guilty by reason of insanity, competence to stand trial and involuntary commitment. Our text revels that not guilty by reason of insanity is “a person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at that time of such conduct, as a result of mental disease of defect, he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law “(Lahey, 2012). With competence to stand trial, is a determination of whether the individual has the ability to understand what and the reason why they are on trial.

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Insanity alludes to the perspective a man is in at the time an offense was conferred. At the point when an individual is found not liable by reason of Insanity, a judge or jury have verified that he or she was so rationally scattered at the time of the wrongdoing that the individual cannot be considered dependable. This was the situation for Andrea Yates, in her second trial (Bartol and Bartol, 2012). The overall population evidently trusts that insanity pleas are utilized effectively to maintain a strategic distance from discipline as a part of an immense rate of cases (indeed, it is utilized as a part of under 1% of cases, and of those, it comes up short 74% of the time) (Bartol and Bartol, 2012).

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The book’s definition of insanity refers to “the legal concept referring to the criminal’s state of mind at the time of the crime was committed. It requires that, due to a mental illness, a defendant lacks moral responsibility and culpability for the crime, and therefore should not be punished” (Costanzo, M., & Krauss, D. Forensic and legal psychology: Psychological science applied to law) There where overwhelming cases about defendant that tried to use the insanity defense. The role that the insanity defense played in conjunction with psychology was that the psychologist would have to choose diverse ways of stating that a defendant was insane. A long with providing expert testimony at trail or competence hearings the psychologists would inform

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