Is the Insanity Plea a legitimate defense?

[electric_warrior]

I think that insanity should be a defence. If, for example, you cut your mother's head off because the devil told you to so you can stop world war 3, then you probably aren't really in control of your actions. It seems to me, though, that Breivik is wildly delusional, but fully aware of his actions and his surroundings and his motivations. He is sane. It is also true, however, that Norway could only sentence him to a maximum of 30 years behind bars, so they've clearly found him insane so they can lock him up forever. I think they played this just right, I mean, there was a serial killer in Colombia (Pedro Lopes or Luis Garavito, I forget which) who killed 200 kids but was only in prison for fifteen years or so because that was the maximum allowed under Colombian law. In those circumstances they probably would have been better off declaring him insane and carting him off to some loony bin for the rest of his life.

But back to the point. The thing is that insane people aren't necessarily bad or evil, they're ill. They aren't prisoners, they're patients and deserve to be treated as such.

 

[gizmo2300]

Nah, if you're able to kill 77 people without feeling bad about it, I'm actually considering why you don't just make him lawless. He's obviously not capable of acting like a human being, so why should he have the rights of one?

But since we're not barbarians and this is not the middle ages, I guess an insane asylum is a better solution.

 

[Something Amyss]

The US goes to some pretty crazy ends to make damn sure that the person is crazy, and stays crazy.

We have a punishment fetish. Plus, it's good business.

 

[badgersprite]

Yes. Absolutely it is.

A large part of the reason why we punish criminal behaviour is because of the guilty mind. You are a sane, free-thinking individual who knows societies laws and knows the difference between right and wrong, and you chose either to flout those laws, or to simply not even care about the laws and/or the people affected by your action. You made that decision of your own free will, and because it was a free choice we see fit to punish you for committing your mind to such an action.

If you are a sane, rational person, and you choose to disregard sanity and rational thought because you are angry, or for any other such reasons, then we see fit to punish you, because you chose that course of action, or committed yourself to a way of thinking that society considers wrong, destructive, and makes you a dangerous person who will probably re-offend. If you make a choice to do something in a certain state of mind, and you are sane when you do so, we have every reason to believe you will make that same decision again if put in a similar situation.

Now, when someone has a mental illness, punishing people becomes a lot more problematic, because that person's actions were not necessarily any kind of free choice. If you are in, say, a state of psychosis where you have blacked out, you were not in control of any of your actions at that time, although your body was committing them. Moreover, it is likely that the reprehensible act or action would not have occurred if you had been given a free choice in a sane state of mind. If you were put in the same situation, but we remove the mental illness or have that same person in a sane state of mind, we have no way of knowing whether they would have made the same decision. We have to assume that person would be innocent or would make the legally condoned decision if they had been acting under their own free will and control at the time.

Thus, it does more benefit to society to attempt to cure people of that mental state. If you have someone who is a completely good member of society, who is kind, friendly, loving, and who works hard, and contributes to their community, but who happens to have a mental disorder beyond their control, and who happens to commit a crime during an episode of that mental illness and not while in a period of sanity, does it not on some level follow that we cannot hold the 'sane' aspect of that person accountable to exactly the same degree as a sane person (or themselves in a sane state) due to the intervening circumstance of a factor beyond their control? Or to put it in really simplistic terms, should the 'sane' side of the personality be punished for the actions of an insane other half who is not the same person at all? We don't hold both sides of conjoined twins accountable for a crime if only one twin committed it, do we?

Really, saying that the insanity plea isn't a legitimate defence at all kind of opens up the door for a lot of exploitation of a lot of people, and not just in the area of criminal law. It's a bit like saying that if you take an insane person off their medications and then get them to sign their life savings over to you, that signature should count, even though in their rational state of mind they would never have made that decision at all.

It's not like we just set these people free to pose a danger to the community, mind you. Arguably, people who plead insanity serve longer 'sentences' on average than sane people who commit crimes, because a successful insanity defence gets you committed to an institution indefinitely, until such a time as you pose no threat whatsoever. Meanwhile, if you send an insane person to jail, there's no guarantee that that environment and lack of sufficient treatment won't make them more violent and more dangerous when they're ultimately freed, which they will be, because, in my country and in Norway, we have maximum sentences. This means that they will definitely get out at some point, providing they don't die in prison.

Now, whether I actually think Anders Breivik is insane is a completely different matter. I am not commenting on Breivik at all here. Nothing I've said is about his case, and I'm not saying that I think it's entirely defensible in his situation. I don't know enough about him or his case to comment.

What's more important, however, is that you don't let one guy using this defence motivate you to take away the rights of an entire class of people who legitimately need this defence. Just because one person uses the defence in a manner you find appalling is not a just reason to advocate taking away the defence entirely. That's like asking whether self-defence is a legitimate defence or whether it should be taken away purely because people can lie about it or because it has been misused in the past and gotten some people off when it shouldn't have.

There is no need to capriciously punish people who actually need that defence all so we can be extra harsh and punitive to this one guy we really hate and want to see get what he deserves. That is entirely the wrong reason to take away people's rights.

 

[Athinira]

Please go ahead and look up the medications used to 'treat' paranoid schizophrenia.

I'll wait.

A wide variety of them is used with different side-effects. Some of then have a tendency to cause involuntary movements, others might have some side effect on the subjects metabolism, which can have a variety of effects, like weight gain (or even diabetes in severe cases).

None of them comes close to the scenario you're describing.

My turn to say you simply have no idea what you are talking about.

What do you think anti-psychotics do, pray tell?

Maybe i should have phrased that better. It's very rarely that strong anti-psychotics is used, since most people in a mental ward suffer from issues that are best alleviated by a low dosis or by a less-than-intense drug.

Breivik in particular isn't suffering to a degree where he is going to be needed to be pumped with these things. Strong anti-psychotic treatment is usually reserved for patients with severe symptoms, like hallucinations. Breivik is simply a disillusioned man, but with a dangerous mindset.

No. I apologize and with respect, I will not back down a single step.

Please, again, look up 'paranoid schizophrenia', the treatments for it, and please speak to at least one person who has been placed on any of those treatments.

Because I am not wrong.

Yes you are.

It's worth remembering that every symptom might affect different persons to a different degree.

Like i said, Breivik might be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but it's a mild case at best. What makes him special, like i said a few lines ago, is that he has a right-wing extremist mindset, which is what makes him dangerous. The man is a monster, but for all his disillusions he is intelligent and capable of planning and logic. He is essentially the living proof that it's a fine line between genius and madman.

Deny, but thank you kindly for attempting to marginalize and dismiss my life as 'too much video games.'

...which i didn't. I was merely being sarcastic with a clever reference to the setting of a good video game. If Arkham Asylum had been a movie or a book, i would still have made the same reference for the simple reason that you describe a mental ward as something that resembles the Asylum a lot.

It might be the case in the United States (i honestly don't know), but not in Scandinavia.

 

[badgersprite]

Insanity is never a defence. Ever. The dead are no less dead, the damage no lesser if the perpetrator was insane, or just as sane as you or I, so why should the punishment be affected at all?

Punishment should fit the crime, not the criminal.

So, if the crime is dependent on damage, you're basically saying that it is the act alone that should be punished. Mental state and intent are meaningless. All that matters is that the criminal action has been committed. The law has been satisfied by the perpetration of the act, and the intention or mental state behind it should not factor in at all.

So, would you feel comfortable sentencing someone who is found guilty of transporting drugs to jail if someone else had slipped the drugs into their bags, and they had no knowledge that the drugs were there. They committed the crime. They transported drugs. When it comes to the actus reus, they are guilty, because that is all the legislation requires. The punishable damage has been committed. Should the fact that they had no knowledge or intention regarding the act be taken into account?

What about someone acting in self-defence who kills someone who was about to shoot them? The dead are no less dead. You've said yourself that their mental state and 'the criminal' should not factor into it at all. It should be irrelevant that they were only acting to defend themselves, right? It shouldn't factor into it at all that the murder would not have been committed if they were not attacked and fearful for their lives. They still took a life, so the circumstances should be irrelevant, and they should be charged with murder, right?

What about someone who passes out at the wheel of their car due to epilepsy or some other illness and happens to hit someone? They had no control over their seizure, but you've said that shouldn't matter. The car hit someone. The fact that they weren't in control of their actions or the act wouldn't have happened but for the seizure is irrelevant to you. They should be held guilty for murder or manslaughter, even though they were unconscious at the time and had no intent or disregard for life at the time.

So, what about a girl who has been drugged with GHB? We should treat any consent she gives to sexual intercourse while under the influence of a drug she did not choose to ingest just as we would treat free and voluntary consent if she had not been drugged? You've said that mental state is irrelevant, right? It's only actions that count. So why shouldn't that count for victims as well as the accused? Let's change this now so it's a child or a mentally retarded girl. Would you treat the consent of a child or a seriously mentally disabled person to sexual intercourse the same as the consent of a fully rational, sane adult man or woman? Because that's effectively what you're saying.

People should be free to go and manipulate the mentally disabled or mentally ill into doing whatever the other person wants them to do because mental state and mental capacity shouldn't count for anything, right?

 

[asinann]

And remember, prisoners in the US are entitled to cable, three meals a day, and shelter(fuck you SCOTUS) while I am not even entitled to eat three meals a day because I do the right thing.

First point: I can understand why you'd mention cable as a something that prisoners shouldn't have (I disagree, but I can see why you have said it), three meals a day seems kinda iffy to me (why is a standard amount of meals (quality not assured) some kind of frivolous luxury for the prisoners?) but shelter? Why would you mention shelter? Shelter is about as basic a need as you get, that's tier one of Maslow's hierarchy basic.

Secondly: Again with the three meals a day thing, perhaps the problem here isn't that the prisoner's shouldn't get it, but that you should. I don't quite understand what you mean by "not entitled", whether that means no-one makes you, no-one encourages you or that you literally can't afford it (or can't have it for some other reason), in those first two cases then there isn't much to say, but in that last case, perhaps society shouldn't deprive prisoners of the food, but get some to you as well.

If I don't work, I don't have any of the things that prisoners get because they are prisoners. If I don't work, I don't have the money for the cable they get for free, the food that they get for free and the shelter that they get for free. Put them all in tents on two meals a day and make them work. They don't work, they don't eat, get cable or a tent.

They broke the law, rehabbing them is nice and all, but they get things that law abiding citizens don't and SCOTUS has said that those things can't be taken from them.

Eliminate all their damn luxuries and maybe I will concede an extra meal to them.

 

[silversnake4133]

And remember, prisoners in the US are entitled to cable, three meals a day, and shelter(fuck you SCOTUS) while I am not even entitled to eat three meals a day because I do the right thing.

First point: I can understand why you'd mention cable as a something that prisoners shouldn't have (I disagree, but I can see why you have said it), three meals a day seems kinda iffy to me (why is a standard amount of meals (quality not assured) some kind of frivolous luxury for the prisoners?) but shelter? Why would you mention shelter? Shelter is about as basic a need as you get, that's tier one of Maslow's hierarchy basic.

Secondly: Again with the three meals a day thing, perhaps the problem here isn't that the prisoner's shouldn't get it, but that you should. I don't quite understand what you mean by "not entitled", whether that means no-one makes you, no-one encourages you or that you literally can't afford it (or can't have it for some other reason), in those first two cases then there isn't much to say, but in that last case, perhaps society shouldn't deprive prisoners of the food, but get some to you as well.

I think asinann was going with more of a "Prisoners are well-fed vs. law abiding citizens having to slave for their over-priced nourishment" since a lot of people now-a-days have to struggle to pay for food if they'd rather pay house/utilities/insurance etc. bills first. Even though no one is "entitled" to 3 meals a day, prisoners are given their food, insurance, a job, mail, and cable television (and in some places internet)* while people who obey the law have to work tirelessly in order to be able to obtain and keep all of those things. Also shelter is the 2nd tier on Maslow's hierarchy, it's listed as "safety from the elements". First tier deals with nourishment such as water and food.

*Or so I have heard from various sources...

 

[xvbones]

Yes you are.

I'm not, but that's okay that you disagree because I am really tired of repeating myself.

So let me focus on this:

...which i didn't. I was merely being sarcastic with a clever reference to the setting of a good video game. If Arkham Asylum had been a movie or a book, i would still have made the same reference for the simple reason that you describe a mental ward as something that resembles the Asylum a lot.

Arkham Asylum is not remotely realistic and does not remotely reflect any real mental health facility in modern times.

It was a flippant, dismissive and incredibly shitty thing to say and frankly, I'm not all that interested in continuing to discuss this with you.

It might be the case in the United States (i honestly don't know), but not in Scandinavia.

You honestly don't know if that is the case in scandinavia, either, though.

But that's not important.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

Umm... Yeah? Why does it matter if they get a life sentence in prison or in the loony bin? They're still out of the way and no longer killing people.

Because if he's sent to the loony bin, they're assuming he can be rehabilitated into the society. He would be treated as if his murdering 77 innocent people was a symptom of illness and not a pre-meditated plan of murder. His lawyer (the poor bastard) will be trying to say that "he's sorry for what he did as he wasn't in control of his actions and that he should be able be made into a functioning member of the public again."

He needs to be locked up in a dirty cell made to look at the pictures of the families he's destroyed and never see the light of day. There are just some people who should have been aborted before birth and he's one of them.

I would contest that. An attempt should be made to rehabilitate people as much as possible. So if you have to opportunity to both confine someone and try to make them a normal person, why wouldn't you?

EDIT: Also, I would argue that murdering 77 people is always a sign of mental illness. A premeditated plan to kill people shows complete disregard for human life, which I would say is itself, a mental illness.

Perhaps a mental illness, but not insanity. Going by that logic, I'm insane because I suffer depression and anxiety, both mental illness.

Are you receiving treatment for that mental illness? If so, how is treating a psychopath any different? And how can you justify not trying?

The idea that he can be rehabilitated is idealistic but illogical. He murdered 77 people, used his religion as an excuse and is acting like he's doing the world a favour. Even if (in some magical world) he was made "normal" again, the families of the people he killed wouldn't get justice and they wouldn't be happy about him being released.

And this is the trouble with the system. Preventing crime should be the priority, and if there's a chance to turn someone into a functioning member of society to free up prison resources for people who can't be, it should be done. If he can't be treated, sure, send him to prison. If not, we should do our best.

Confine him, yes. But don't waste valuable resources on someone who doesn't deserve them when.

Deserve them? Really? Anyone with trouble in the head deserves the chance to be treated.

You can never know if he is normal, and his abnormality is simply far FAR too dangerous. You shouldn't trust this guy with even a ball-point pen! Not ever.

I don't really care if he lives or dies, we should learn from Moby Dick about the folly of wanting revenge on a being that does not have reason. I just want it so that he never hurts anyone again, a lethal measure would be the most sure guarantee but I guess a mental asylum would be the same. As long as they NEVER release him. As I'm sure they won't.

I concede that point, but we aren't in a position to make that assessment. That's the job of trained professionals to decide and act on. But if they find that he can be made into "normal" person, they should.

 

[Cain_Zeros]

If psych wards in Norway are anything like they are in Canada they're pretty damn creepy. And I was just visiting someone on a psych ward in a small town hospital (long story that I don't want to discuss with random people online). And either way if someone is genuinely mentally ill, it's far better for them to get treatment than get locked up in prison where they will almost certainly get worse. And it's not like he's going free after a couple years of therapy. Guys like him might not every walk out of a psych ward, because they don't let you out until they're satisfied you are 100% healthy.

You are strongly mistaking "Psychiatric Ward for possibly the rest of his life" for "Getting off scot-free".

He is going to be behind lock and key, heavily medicated and very likely personally restrained for the rest of his life.

Seriously, not kidding, the man will spend the rest of his life strapped to a bed for days on end (shitting and pissing himself day in and day out, i need to stress this, when they strap you to a bed, if you need to shit, you shit yourself. He is going to be spending a lot of time shitting and pissing himself.) punctuated by long 'interview' sessions wherein doctors will treat him as though he is a neutered monster trapped under a microscope.

Oh, and because he is clearly pretty fucking violent, he's likely going to be kept 'regulated' on Halperidol or stronger Haldol isn't one of the 'fun' meds. Any time this man has not under that microscope or literally strapped to a bed, he is basically going to be sitting in a corner, drooling at a wall.

His sentence is somewhat analogous to lifelong solitary confinement, except that he's going to be under the direct, physical care of probably like a half-dozen or more very large orderlies who probably don't particularly like him even a little bit. Even a little. (because btw each and every one of them knows exactly who he is. exactly who he is)

He has not gotten away with shit.

He is, however, clearly out of his fucking mind.

It is generally not a good idea to put clearly fucking batshit psychotics into a prison with other people who are, while possibly violent, are not likely to be batshit psychotic.
If you do that, people get killed. Either someone kills him or he kills someone, there is no option C.

Norway has chosen to medicate the brains out of this monster, strap him to a bed and stick him in a box under a microscope.

I feel this was the appropriate choice.

Actually I guess this is pretty much what I said, but stated much more clearly.

 

[xvbones]

Forgive this. This has been weighing on me. What I'm going to do is respond to this bit here and then I'm going to put you on ignore, which i feel will likely be best for everyone involved, and then we will all be happy.

Please go ahead and look up the medications used to 'treat' paranoid schizophrenia.

I'll wait.

A wide variety of them is used with different side-effects. Some of then have a tendency to cause involuntary movements, others might have some side effect on the subjects metabolism, which can have a variety of effects, like weight gain (or even diabetes in severe cases).

None of them comes close to the scenario you're describing.

This. This is how I know you have no idea what you are talking about.

I asked you to look up anti-psychotics and you looked up the side effects.

The side effects. Not what the drug itself actually does, as in the primary effects, no, you looked up the side effects.

Let me tell you something about every single mental institution on this entire planet: when you are checked in, the very first thing that happens to you is you are interviewed by one or several doctors who then determine your medication.

Morning, noon and night, you are then given your meds. Morning, noon and night.

If you should refuse, you are restrained and forced to take them. For your own safety. For the staff's safety.

'Strapped to a bed' is standard mental institution restraint. Yes, sir, in Scandinavia, too. For your own safety and for the safety of the staff. If they ever feel that you are becoming a danger to yourself or to anyone else, you are restrained and sedated.

So that you cannot hurt anyone.

Yes. Even in Scandinavia.

The primary effect of halperidol is what I described and halperidol is a primary medication prescribed to paranoid schizophrenics.
Primary.

In mental health facilities, people do not just wander around unmedicated, ever. They are not given medication only if they are acting up or only if they are babbling to themselves and smearing feces on the walls.

No.

Morning, noon and night. Little paper cup full of pills. You line up with the rest of the people in your wing, you get a little paper cup of pills and a larger paper cup of water and they watch you take it.

If you HAVE been acting up, you are restrained. If they think you are lipping your pills and not taking them, you are restrained. If you display any behavior that can be construed as dangerous to yourself or to anyone else, you are restrained.

Even in Scandinavia.

Breivik in particular isn't suffering to a degree where he is going to be needed to be pumped with these things. Strong anti-psychotic treatment is usually reserved for patients with severe symptoms, like hallucinations. Breivik is simply a disillusioned man...

delusional.

, but with a dangerous mindset.

And then there is this, my second big hint that you honestly do not know what you're talking about, because none of the above is true. Even in Scandinavia.

Like i said, Breivik might be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but it's a mild case at best.

Third big hint. You have not studied psychology or behavioral psychology or psychiatry or fucking sociology or any other science of the mind or of people, ever, and it shows.

"It's a mild case at best?" Seriously?

Seriously?

What makes him special, like i said a few lines ago, is that he has a right-wing extremist mindset, which is what makes him dangerous. The man is a monster, but for all his disillusions...

delusions.

...he is intelligent and capable of planning and logic. He is essentially the living proof that it's a fine line between genius and madman.

No. Completely incorrect.
He is quite simply a paranoid schizophrenic with severe sociopathic tendancies.
Clear and present psychotic behavior.
No fine line.
He is just fucking crazy.

You are romanticizing what is going on in his head because you, again, have no idea what you are talking about.

You very obviously neither work in a mental health profession, nor are you mentally ill.

You have spent no time in any mental health facility and neither has anyone in your family or any of your friends.

And that's great. That's worth bragging about. They aren't fun places.

But, and I must say this one last time, it also means that you are arguing from a position of absolute ignorance.

...But that's pretty fucking obvious, if you thought Arkham Asylum was a realistic portrayal of any mental health institution in America within the last fifty fucking years.

Please do not bother responding, I'm sick of repeating myself and I won't see it, anyway.

Good day, sir.

 

[Nikolaz72]

Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in a rampage in Norway last July, isn't going to

jail. A mental evaluation found he inhabited a ''delusional universe'' and was ''psychotic'' at

the time of the attacks. He is now going to stay in a Psychiatric Ward for possibly the rest of

his life. What do you guys think about this? Should he have gone to Jail or do you think the

prosecutors are right in just putting him in a Psych ward? Or in that case, what do you think

we, as a race, should do with people who were "delusional" or "psychotic" during the time of a

murder or an attack?

Prisons are for rehabilitation, not for keeping people away from the general public, nor for revenge. Besides, psychiatric ward is like prison. Except you dont get out early for good behavior.

 

[Mittenz]

I see the point being made that because his attack was premeditated, it means he wasn't insane. It doesn't matter that he realized that the people he would shoot were going to die. His belief is that Muslims are going to take over Europe, force sharia law on everyone, and kill those that don't comply. He felt his only option to stop this, was to go and massacre an entire camp full of people, who he felt would grow up to be politicians and allow Muslims into Europe. THESE ARE NOT THE THOUGHTS OF A SANE PERSON! Regardless of whether or not a person is brought into a "psychotic frenzy" prior to their act, they may still very be insane, and in need of psychological help, which a Psych ward can provide. Insanity is absolutely, a legitimate defense.

 

[NEREVAR117]

No, the insanity plea is bullshit in the sense that it's not even applied properly. This is a prime example as the man clearly knew what he was doing. However, it has it's worth because it's still imprisoning the very, very dangerous people and keeping them from possibly rehabilitating criminals in prison.

 

[Treblaine]

The Norwegian, and wider Scandinavian, prisons are all about reforming the prisoners so they can get out and contribute to society again after they have served their sentence.

That means that they must be in an environment that is not severely disconnected from society.
It also means that they will be able to get educated, eat properly and are treated with respect and dignity.

Treating people like monsters only serves to create monsters.

Look at the statistics.
Norway has a 20% relapse rate after 2 years.
US and UK has around 50-60%.

Before you compare prison life, compare life outside prisons.

I don't know how good community outreach efforts are in Norway/Scandanavia but in the UK once out of jail there is very little follow up, so many don't go into employment or education, they fall back into the groups and practices that landed them in jail in the first place. In gangs, drug using and dealing, and just being stuck in places of deprivation and no employment prospects nothing to do but get into trouble.

Deprivation is, above all else, is the largest factor in crime. Both the first crime they are caught for, and recidivism.

Prison is only a discouragement in relative terms. It's not nice being incarcerated but you have to compare to some of the run-down shitholes they come from, where litter piles up in the streets and gangs of vandals roam unopposed by police. In jail at least you get three square meals, and instead of a damp leaky house and unable to afford the fuel bill a heated and clean cell. There is order and structure in prison, the only thing that is really lacking is companionship of the opposite sex. Yeah they don't have a car or the ability to travel but on the outside they had no money to travel anyway.

Government is not cruel enough to force prisoners to live in unheated cells, but they do not care enough to make sure everyone can afford to heat their home. Heating your home is a problem when some yob smashes your double-glazing windows and you have no way to repair them properly beyond crudely taping them up again.

I think its quite irrelevant how nice Scandinavian prisons are. They could be hellholes or hotels. The point is that the praise belongs to their social engineering ensuring you don't have failed estates and pits of unemployment and generational criminality. I'm not saying poverty causes crime or that poor people are criminals, just that criminality thrives in deprivation.

 

[Treblaine]

No, the insanity plea is bullshit in the sense that it's not even applied properly. This is a prime example as the man clearly knew what he was doing. However, it has it's worth because it's still imprisoning the very, very dangerous people and keeping them from possibly rehabilitating criminals in prison.

Uh, well his actions show clear reasoning in a mechanical sense, he was able to orchestrate this attack but his reasoning for WHY to do this are clearly utterly insane. His manifesto is full of contradictions of intentions and effect. Mechanical reasoning like building a bomb and figuring out how to kill as many people as possible in a shooting spree, are separate from emphatic reasoning such as understanding peoples intentions and reactions.

We've known since Phineas Gage that parts of the brain being damaged have particular effects. The brain isn't like the liver as one homogeneous organ that functions as a whole, different parts have different jobs.

Brevik thought he could start a racist revolution against Muslims by his mass murder of mainly white christians, that clearly defies all rationality. Hitler and the Nazis, they were not insane. They were evil but they were sane enough to distance themselves from violence to seize power and when they used violence again in the Holocaust they concealed it and knew it was something to be ashamed of. Hermann Göring in the Nuremberg trials refused to look at the projectors showing footage from the Nazi Death camps and tried to hide his face in shame. All the other nazis killed themselves rather than face up to what they had done. They had done it for reasons of hate, and totally unjustified hatred at that.

But Brevik acts like everyone should be grateful for what he had done. That's insanity. What he did was evil, of course, but for insane reasons.

 

[Muspelheim]

Exactly. Some people seem to possess this idea that madness in any form is a debilitating condition. It can be in some cases, but that's not a given fact. Even if you are not sane, you can still look and behave like you are, and you can still carefully plan and carry out an action. You still have your cognitive abilities.

So, it is perfectly possible for someone insane to carefully plan an attack like this, while also seeming perfectly normal to the outside world. Breivik's dementia didn't reduce him into an incapable, jibbering loony á la comicbook. It was the fact that he believed in his twisted fairytales, he truly believed the muslims where out to get him, and he truly believed that his actions were the right ones to take. That is where his insanity lies.

What truly scares me is that there are perfectly sane people who shares a similar view of the world, and are just as capable as Breivik to carry out attacks on their percieved enemies...

 

[SilentCom]

I don't consider it a defense except in the cases where it is "temporary insanity" brought on by rage, pain or other circumstances.

However.. I think people have far to much of a view that this plea leads to people not being punished... a high security psych ward is definately not better, and for most people probably far worse, than prison.

Isn't that called a crime of passion?

Anyways, I think the insanity plea is over-used. How would a person know that they are insane? I think a lot of people use it to get out of jail time.

 

[Exerzet]

Insanity is never a defence. Ever. The dead are no less dead, the damage no lesser if the perpetrator was insane, or just as sane as you or I, so why should the punishment be affected at all?

Punishment should fit the crime, not the criminal.

So, if the crime is dependent on damage, you're basically saying that it is the act alone that should be punished. Mental state and intent are meaningless. All that matters is that the criminal action has been committed. The law has been satisfied by the perpetration of the act, and the intention or mental state behind it should not factor in at all.

So, would you feel comfortable sentencing someone who is found guilty of transporting drugs to jail if someone else had slipped the drugs into their bags, and they had no knowledge that the drugs were there. They committed the crime. They transported drugs. When it comes to the actus reus, they are guilty, because that is all the legislation requires. The punishable damage has been committed. Should the fact that they had no knowledge or intention regarding the act be taken into account?

What about someone acting in self-defence who kills someone who was about to shoot them? The dead are no less dead. You've said yourself that their mental state and 'the criminal' should not factor into it at all. It should be irrelevant that they were only acting to defend themselves, right? It shouldn't factor into it at all that the murder would not have been committed if they were not attacked and fearful for their lives. They still took a life, so the circumstances should be irrelevant, and they should be charged with murder, right?

What about someone who passes out at the wheel of their car due to epilepsy or some other illness and happens to hit someone? They had no control over their seizure, but you've said that shouldn't matter. The car hit someone. The fact that they weren't in control of their actions or the act wouldn't have happened but for the seizure is irrelevant to you. They should be held guilty for murder or manslaughter, even though they were unconscious at the time and had no intent or disregard for life at the time.

So, what about a girl who has been drugged with GHB? We should treat any consent she gives to sexual intercourse while under the influence of a drug she did not choose to ingest just as we would treat free and voluntary consent if she had not been drugged? You've said that mental state is irrelevant, right? It's only actions that count. So why shouldn't that count for victims as well as the accused? Let's change this now so it's a child or a mentally retarded girl. Would you treat the consent of a child or a seriously mentally disabled person to sexual intercourse the same as the consent of a fully rational, sane adult man or woman? Because that's effectively what you're saying.

People should be free to go and manipulate the mentally disabled or mentally ill into doing whatever the other person wants them to do because mental state and mental capacity shouldn't count for anything, right?

Of course you're right. "The voices told me to rip off the reverend's penis and then shove it up a nun's fanny while forcefeeding a child with blood" is a PERFECT defence, and should let the perpetrator off entirely. After all, they were "mad"

Pardon the outburst, but although eloquently put, your arguments remain flawed. You seem to forget that the intent was there. Rightly I did not specify it in my initial argument that intent was a pre-requisite, but since we were discussing the case of a lunatic taking automatic weapons and murdering teens I thought it was obvious.

Certainly the person who is unconcious behind the wheel/having a seizure can get their penalty lessened, but not stricken.

As for the drug argument: Would you blame a bag for someone putting something in it? For the bag has the same ammount of knowledge that the "smuggler" has about what is going on. Find the culprit, punish the culprit, as for how to prove their innocence in this matter: I leave that up to the people who do such things for a living.

Hopefully this helped clarify what I meant.