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Is insanity a valid defense?

Bodi

Bodi

Just waiting for my set...
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I don't think that Insanity is a reasonable defence argument. Not one that gets the murderer a reduced sentence, at least. To intentionally murder one requires insanity. No sane person intentional murders. No sane person can pre-meditate a murder. Pre-mediation requires sanity.

Agree or not?
 
Bodhisattva said:
I don't think that Insanity is a reasonable defence argument. Not one that gets the murderer a reduced sentence, at least. To intentionally murder one requires insanity. No sane person intentional murders. No sane person can pre-meditate a murder. Pre-mediation requires sanity.

Agree or not?
Click to expand...

Winning an insanity plea doesn't get you a reduced sentence. It changes where you wind up going.

In many cases, people actually wind up spending more time locked up than they would have if they'd been convicted -- they just spend it in a ward rather than a prison. And by all accounts, most crimially insane mental wards are basically hell on earth.
 
Bodhisattva said:
I don't think that Insanity is a reasonable defence argument. Not one that gets the murderer a reduced sentence, at least. To intentionally murder one requires insanity. No sane person intentional murders. No sane person can pre-meditate a murder. Pre-mediation requires sanity.

Agree or not?
Click to expand...

I don't know. Causality of physics a side, there does seem to me a difference between a person lost his bearings murdering someone and a person, whose business is murder. The two probably also require different punishment and correctional procedures to be rational.
 
Bodhisattva said:
I don't think that Insanity is a reasonable defence argument. Not one that gets the murderer a reduced sentence, at least. To intentionally murder one requires insanity. No sane person intentional murders. No sane person can pre-meditate a murder. Pre-mediation requires sanity.

Agree or not?
Click to expand...

I'm not a mental health expert, so I don't want to tread to far into unknown territory, but I think its safe to say that there are some people that are so mentally unbalanced that they don't know what planet they are on, let alone aware of what they are doing.

I have no idea what the number is for those people, but I suspect its higher than we can imagine.

What do you do with people that commit a crime and are suffering from audio/visual hallucinations as a result of mental illness?

I don't have an answer.
 
Bodhisattva said:
I don't think that Insanity is a reasonable defence argument. Not one that gets the murderer a reduced sentence, at least. To intentionally murder one requires insanity. No sane person intentional murders. No sane person can pre-meditate a murder. Pre-mediation requires sanity.

Agree or not?
Click to expand...

Disagree, and pretty much every psychologist and criminologist on the planet would disagree with you.

Why do you think you can't murder someone if they're sane?? Does that apply to all other crimes as well? If not, what makes the act of murder different in your view?
 
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