Psychopathy: Criteria For Guilty Except For Insanity

PART 1:

Psychopathy is a personality disorder that can be broadly defined by impulsivity, anti-social behaviors, and lack of empathy. Those afflicted are prone to be guided largely by more immediate wants and tend to seek the quickest ways to satisfy them, often through manipulation or brute force, with no regard for who they hurt or what laws they break in pursuit of their goals. There is no treatment and psychopaths don’t tend to seek it as they tend to see their lack of meaningful emotion as a strength setting them apart from the rest of the world (Hare, 1999).

PART 2:

• Contrary to popular belief, psychopaths can be encountered in all walks of life. Some are semi-functioning members of society, perhaps the difficult family members, always

As it stands, psychopathy, or Anti-Social Personality Disorder, does not meet the criteria for Guilty Except for Insanity plea, by virtue of being a personality disorder defined by anti-social behavior, as well as by the lack of symptoms that would preclude them from understanding the criminality of their actions or prevent them from being able to comply with the law (Hare, 1999; Effect of qualifying mental disorder). When describing his murders, Kuklinski doesn’t cite any delusion that caused him to act them out, instead he seems to have had a perfectly clear understanding of the criminality of his actions, and, even as he struggled to fully grasp why the descriptions of his actions evoked horror from the people around him, he seemed to fully realize that the rest of the world does not find murder as an appropriate course of action in the circumstances he described committing them in (Ginsberg,

Emotional and interpersonal symptoms refer to the psychopaths’ glibness, egocentricity, manipulativeness, lack of guilt and empathy, as well as their shallow emotions. Social deviance, on the other hand, describes the psychopaths’ need for excitement, impulsivity, lack of behavioral controls, childhood behavior problems and adult anti-social behaviors (Hare, 1999). In Kuklinski’s case, most of these symptoms seem easily apparent: his confusion when the psychiatrist interviewing him questions whether Kuklinski had any visceral reaction to seeing the results of blowing someone’s face off with a shogun showcases his lack of empathy; his depictions of murder are glib; he describes times where small infractions of others resulted in impulsive violence as a response on his part (Ginsberg,