I think, personally, that insanity as defined in a few of the above comments, is only sightly being touched. I will honestly say I am no professor, doctor, or even person of higher learning, but my personal opinion on sanity and insanity is that they are demorcatic principles.
For example, say a person is raised in a culture where upon entering early adulthood, the right of passage is to kill the eldest person in the village, cook and consume their brains, thereby to gain their lifetimes experiences and knowledge. Now, in that society, such would not only be sane, but expected behavior.
Now, remove that young person, and put him in anytown, USA. He gets up one morning, kills his elderly neighbor, cooks and consumes her brain, and is instantly lables “crazy” or insane by the public, even before he has benefit of so called mental evaulation.
Such said evaluation will be conucted by a doctor that is going to listen, note, study and judge his actions (Murder and cannablism) and his reasoning ( Its ok to kill the elderly out of respect to learn all they have learned, etc.) Being from a society that frowns not only on cannablism, but even on murder (Or even worse, gentricide) he is likely to declared either evil, or insane.
But by whose measure? That of a society with a drasticaly different viewpoint than that in which the youngster spent his formative years.
I guess, in a very long and convoluted way what i am trying to say is just this : There is no good and evil, sane and insane. there are only actions, and the REACTIONS of others become the definition of the simple acts themselves.
Isn’t that the same as asking if you knew what you were doing was against the law? Isn’t the law a set of morals that society has set? If I knew what I was doing was against the law, didn’t I know that what I was doing was something society would see as wrong?
The difference is that a criminal is aware that what he is doing is illegal and is capable of deciding the circumstances of his crime; an insane person is not. For example, a criminal would not choose to kill a person for five dollars if he saw a police car was parked thirty feet away. An insane person who believes demons are inside his head and are about to eat his brain if he doesn’t kill the person standing next to him, would go ahead and kill regardless of the presense of the police.
What do you want; a checklist? A score of 65 or more means crazy, 64 or less means evil? The matter will be argued before in a courtroom and (hopefully) a reasonable determination will be reached on a case-by-case basis.
Most “normal” people don’t commit serious crimes of any kind. Under your standard, no one would ever be found guilty of a felony.
You asked who decides what’s right and wrong. In the criminal law context, it’s decided at every level of your government. Your elected officials define what is a crime, hopefully based upon policy concerns and morals of the people they represent. If they get it very wrong, hopefully they’re replaced with people who will reflect the morals of the people.
As for the legal defense of insanity, several people already did a nice job of explaining that crazy doesn’t mean you get off on an insanity defense. If you are accused with a crime, it is assumed that you are sane and it’s very difficult for you to prove otherwise. (For one thing, there will be battling psychiatrists.) People are very very rarely acquitted for insanity. The “irresistable impulse” standard mentioned above is the law in some states. But there is a higher standard in about half the states and at the federal level. I believe that higher standard is in part due to the outrage over Hinkley.
If you’re looking for more of a policy consideration, the thought is that if you committed a crime because you were sick, then you should get treatment rather than punishment. For this reason, it’s my opinion that psychiatrists tend to testify that the defendant is insane in the not-legally-culpable sense when the person can be treated, but the psychiatrist doesn’t support the defense if the defendant is a psychopath who can’t be fixed. I don’t really know, but I wonder whether the early insanity standards came about when psychiatry was emerging. Given the recent focus on how you can’t cure child molesters, it’s interesting that they’re not sick enough to be insane, but they’re too sick to let out of prison so they get committed to hospitals after their prison sentence is up for the purpose of “treatment.”
Most “normal” people don’t commit serious crimes of any kind. Under your standard, no one would ever be found guilty of a felony.
You asked who decides what’s right and wrong. In the criminal law context, it’s decided at every level of your government. Your elected officials define what is a crime, hopefully based upon policy concerns and morals of the people they represent. If they get it very wrong, hopefully they’re replaced with people who will reflect the morals of the people.
As for the legal defense of insanity, several people already did a nice job of explaining that crazy doesn’t mean you get off on an insanity defense. If you are accused with a crime, it is assumed that you are sane and it’s very difficult for you to prove otherwise. (For one thing, there will be battling psychiatrists.) People are very very rarely acquitted for insanity. The “irresistable impulse” standard mentioned above is the law in some states. But there is a higher standard in about half the states and at the federal level. I believe that higher standard is in part due to the outrage over Hinkley.
If you’re looking for more of a policy consideration, the thought is that if you committed a crime because you were sick, then you should get treatment rather than punishment. For this reason, it’s my opinion that psychiatrists tend to testify that the defendant is insane in the not-legally-culpable sense when the person can be treated, but the psychiatrist doesn’t support the defense if the defendant is a psychopath who can’t be fixed. I don’t really know, but I wonder whether the early insanity standards came about when psychiatry was emerging. It seems to have been tweaked by legislatures and courts as our understanding of psychiatry changed.