Compliance and Responsibility: New Issues for the Insanity Defense

Abstract

A number of recent studies have been made of the insanity defense, especially in light of the verdict in Hinckley. All of these studies, however, overlook a crucial set of cases involving noncompliance with psychiatric treatment. Unlike standard cases of criminal insanity, these cases involve the responsibility of the patient for his psychotic state, i.e., he can decide to stop his treatment, after which he becomes psychotic and then may commit crimes of various sorts. This article is an analysis of these sorts of cases and the ways in which they are like or unlike other seemingly similar cases such as the treatment of offenders who are intoxicated at the time their offenses are committed.