Insanity Defense In Psychology

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

The mental state could be mentioned at the sentencing hearing in hopes that the defendant would receive treatment while incarcerated. The insanity defense has a lot of elements to it like the M’Naghten rule where there are multiple parts to it For instance “(1) a presumption that the defendant are sane and responsible for the crime;(2) a requirement that, at the moment of the crime, the accused must have been laboring “under a defect of reason” or “from disease of the mind”; (3) a requirement that the defendant “did not know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong” (Costanzo, M., & Krauss, D. Forensic and legal psychology: Psychological science applied to law). Example the not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) refer to the fact since a defendant’s mental state, the defendant should not be responsible for the criminal act do with the insanity. The other case was the Hinckley v. United State where the world got to witness Hinckley getting away with trying to kill the president of the United State and the only thing that happen to Hinckley had been committed to a psychiatric hospital and not correctional

Next the guilty but mentally ill (GBMI) refers to when a defendant is guilty of a crime and goes to correctional faculty and receive treatment from the defendant’s mental state while in the correctional institution. Between the (NGRI), (GBMI) was mens rea defense, which means “a case presented by the defense that concedes the defendant committed the crime (actus reus) but argues that the defendants lack the requisite mental awareness and intent.” (Costanzo, M., & Krauss, D. Forensic and legal psychology: Psychological science applied to law) Well they came up the mens rea defense to help the defendants that were (GBMI) the defendants could be charge with a lesser offense then if they used the insanity defense there was no chance of getting convicted of a lesser offense. In general, the overall success of the insanity defense is real high “because judges often defer to the opinions of experts on insanity (note the 91% rate in the Hawaii sample), agreement between judges and an instrument or an expert tells us little about whether someone is truly insane.” (Costanzo, M., & Krauss, D. Forensic and legal psychology: Psychological science applied to law) However the four state that doesn’t have the insanity defense isn’t