Justice and the Insanity Defense

Abstract

Making insane persons liable for their criminal acts may be unjust. There are two reasons for this. If such persons are handicapped by mental illness in a way that deprives them of the ability to abide by the law, they enjoy the same excuse as anyone else who is helpless, and recognition of the excuse is a requirement of justice. Furthermore, the suffering inevitably produced by making a person liable to criminal punishment turns out to be unjustifiable in such a case, since in these circumstances the punishment is unnecessary. The injustice of punishing such persons must not be confused, however, with the injustice of holding liable a person whose act was without those mental elements required under the law for a particular crime. Conceived broadly, there are four varieties of disability that matter for a defense of insanity, and for policy reasons there must be some definite pathology to account for their presence if they are to be acceptable as the basis of a defense of insanity.