The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law
Chapter 11: Excuse Me!
Excuse pg 17: Diminished Capacity
Average Joe explaining
AVERAGE JOE
In real life, Insanity defenses are almost never raised.
And they almost never succeed.
So keep all this in perspective.
People are more likely to try the related defense of DIMINISHED CAPACITY.
Joe talking head
AVERAGE JOE
Though it’s rarely a winner, either.
Diminished Capacity is when you didn’t have a mental problem, so you weren’t legally insane, but something else made you unable to understand what you were doing, or that it was wrong.
Isn’t this culturally different? In the end, all purposefully-committed violent crimes have some degree of mental instability as a significant factor. This ends up with some countries favoring more treatment for criminals compared to retributive punishment.
That is a myth. Most violent offenders are not mentally ill at all. In fact, the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violent crimes than they are to be perpetrators of violent crimes.
https://depts.washington.edu/mhreport/facts_violence.php
Point, missed. He’s not saying that those we currently recognise as mentally ill commit violent crimes but that being willing to commit violent crimes is in itself evidence that there is something wrong with your mental state and that should be fixed so you’re no longer willing to commit violent crimes.
Even then it isn’t true. I admit that these are old figures, but they are the most recent that I could find. only 1.2% of those convicted of homicide in the U.S. commit an additional homicide after their punishment is complete. Prison really does seem to be sufficient to prevent most killers from returning to their old ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism#Recidivism_rates
Generally, those whom prison evidently does not prevent from re-offending are those who commit economically motivated crime, such as theft and trafficking in contraband. Maybe this is just me, but I do not think that breaking the law strictly for economic gain is sufficient evidence of mental instability on its own.
It seems no crazier than a combination of believing in the viability of gambling and having a slightly diminished amount of empathy for strangers IMO.
And this misconception is offensive to the majority of us who actually suffer from mental illness. The simple fact is that people can do incredibly horrible things without being mentally ill. A perfectly healthy person is entirely capable of making decisions which are selfish, self-destructive, destructive to others, or generally unethical. “Violent behavior,” “immorality,” and “hurting people” are not diseases in any medical sense, nor can they be “fixed” by any ethical psychiatric treatment.