Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
Mental illness and the insanity defense
Upholding insanity defence
Mental illness and the insanity defense
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Mental illness and the insanity defense
Upholding insanity defence
Mental illness and the insanity defense
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Houston, Texas, was home to Andrea Yates; a wife and a mother to Randy Yates and their five children. One morning in the year 2001, she dialed, 911 breathing heavily into the phone “I need a police officer,” (O’Malley). The news over Andrea Yates drowning her children spread like wildfire across the nation, horrifying Americans. Following her confession, she pleaded innocent with the “Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity” (NGRI) plea, yet the jury rejected her appeal and found her guilty of five accounts of first-degree murder. However, in the retrial of 2006, Yates’ abiding murder convictions were overturned, and Andrea Yates was found NGRI.
In Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator should not be guilty by reason of insanity. “Insanity Defense” states that a man is innocent by means of insanity if he has committed the crime because he is “unable to control his impulses” as a result of mental disease (“Insanity Defense” 1). Similarly, the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” viewed the old man’s “pale blue eye, with a film over it” with hatred (Poe 1). When the old man’s eye looked upon the narrator, he would uncontrollably increase in fury and anger. This led the narrator to “[make] up [his] mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid [him]self of the eye forever” (Poe 1).
The narrator was so consumed with the man's eye that he killed him just to get rid of the man's judgment. Though there were some repercussions with his immoral choices,he cannot take the terrible things
And every night he would slip away not being able to do it, why? Because the man’s eye was always closed. The whole reason for the murder was because of the man’s diseased “vulture” eye. Without the motive, the murder couldn’t happen. People suffering from insanity would blame the victim for their own crime which exactly what is happening here.
(66). The criminal is aware that he murdered someone, yet shows no remorse. A person who is criminally insane does not understand the effects and consequences of their actions, and therefore cannot take responsibility for them. The murderer also hides his wrongdoings from the police. If he were criminally insane, he would not have to lie about his actions.
Yes, taking these precautions was sane of him, but stalking, murdering, and hallucinating are all traits that lead towards being insane. In the end, the narrator did prove to be insane, with his reasonless murder, and absurd hallucinations. But all in all, even if the evidence does lead to the narrator being insane, as Poe once said, “The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our
The man says, “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing.” Tying in with the arrogant tones as well, the man has a very dark mind and the readers get a glimpse of his thought train through first person. He explains he needs to “take the life of the old man and thus rid myself of the eye forever.” No sane person would kill over a color of an eye, but as he describes the old man’s eye, the audience begins to understand why he takes the life of the old man.
We can definitely go CRAZY INSANE sometimes! But that doesn't mean that we are wrong. In "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe, the narrator is somewhat of a madman who kills an old man because of the way his eye looks. Despite initially getting away with the murder, the narrator is eventually caught, and thrown in jail. Throughout the entire story he continuously describes how he is NOT insane.
As a result, the narrator is insane and should not be prosecuted. To start off , the eye drove the narrator to insanity, which led him to take the life of the old man, The narrator does not know right from wrong. In the story, the narrator said that “For it was not the old man who vexed me, but his evil eye”(Poe). This quote from the passage proves that he is insane because he is deciding to kill someone over his “vulture eye”. A sane person would realize that killing someone over a eye is a silly, wrong thing
One sign of the narrator being insane is that he has impulsive behavior. For example, the narrator says, “First of all, I dismembered the corpse, I cut off the head, and the arms, and the legs, or … works as well” (12). This means that he cut off the body without thinking about it beforehand. Furthermore, the narrator also says that he did not just leave the body there, but hid it too. All of this matters because it was a very sudden action
In the gruesome short story “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe a nameless narrator tells his story of his drunken and moody life before he gets hung the next day. The intoxicated narrator kills his favorite cat, Pluto and his wife with an axe. Soon enough, the narrator gets caught and there he ends up, in jail. Although, most readers of “The Black Cat” have argued the narrators insanity, more evidence have shown that he is just a moody alcoholic with a lousy temper.
The insanity defence is a defence that can be used in trial by a defendant to argue that they are not guilty by reason of insanity. It is based on whether they were of sound mind at the time of the crime and whether they could differentiate between the right and wrongs of their actions. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the laws, legislation, and tests regarding the insanity defence have evolved drastically as subsequent ways of determining insanity and who receives the defence have been deemed insufficient. Throughout the years, the defence has become less and less of a loophole for defendants trying to use it as a ‘get out of jail free card’ where they can avoid a just punishment, as now, clear, and convincing evidence to prove they
All of his deranged actions validate his madness. The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is discernibly a madman. His motives, actions, and thoughts prove his insanity. The definition of insanity fits the narrator to a T. His psychosis controlled his behaviors and pushed him into chopping up another human being and disposing the pieces like
Ultimately it comes down to this, insane or sane? Insane would be the perfect way of describing a person being mad, killing a man for no reason, and laughing at a horrifying death. After having the narrator showing so many things to prove he is insane rather than sane is pretty clear. The author allows a visual understanding of the narrator in the “Tell Tale Heart” from having many specific details about his point of view.
Firstly, he killed the old man because of his eye. Additionally , he claimed that he kept hearing the heartbeat when the old man was dead. In closing, he had no control over himself. The difference between a sane person and an insane person is how they think and act. The narrator is obviously insane since he acted easy and normal in situations that are expected to be handled differently, like the time the policemen came to question him about the noises coming out of the house.