Justice and the Insanity Defense

Justice and the Insanity Defense

In contemporary American criminal justice, insanity is a defense to criminal charges. When it is successfully asserted, it bars criminal conviction and the corresponding penal sentences associated with the even the most serious criminal offenses, including murder. Generally, defendants who are adjudicated to be insane may be confined to mental health facilities for as long as their mental capacity remains unchanged. However, it is also conceivably possible for murderers to be released much sooner than the term or incarceration they would have received for criminal conviction if their mental state improves substantially shortly after their being adjudicated insane.

In principle, the justification for recognizing the insanity defense is based on the underlying concept of mens rea, or "guilty mind" in Latin, the concept being that the mental capacity to understand that specific actions are wrong is a fundamental prerequisite for the justified imposition of penal sanctions for that conduct. In American criminal justice, the insanity defense is applicable whenever the defendant (through legal counsel) can establish that he was suffering from a mental condition that rendered him unable to appreciate the nature of his action as being wrong at the time of the crime. It is thought that protecting the insane defendant from punishment for conduct he was incapable of controlling or understanding is more compassionate than imposing penal sanctions. However, there are ethical considerations that may yield the entirely opposite conclusion: namely, that there is nothing necessarily compassionate about subjecting the rest of society to the consequences of recognizing the insanity defense.

There are several bases for opposing the application of the insanity defense to criminal charges. First, it conflicts with one of the fundamental purposes of the criminal justice system: namely, the removal of dangerous offenders from society for the benefit (i.e. safety) of law-abiding members of the community. That is particularly important in connection with criminally insane defendants whose mental conditions are treatable but dependent on the individual's maintaining a prescription drug regimen. For example, it is an individual suffering from a known mental condition that qualifies for the criteria of criminal insanity may be able to control that condition by following his physicians' orders for prescription medication and then simply stop taking the medication. It is conceivably possible that he could commit murder while legally insane and then be returned to society relatively soon based on resuming the appropriate medical treatment.