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UT student murder trial (Haruka Weiser)


bschoolprof

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Yeah they were probably debating whether he was completely off his cracker [/no pun intended].  I think he's partly nuts & may not have understood the depth of what he did, but he probably knew right from wrong.

Edited by phdhorn
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The M'Naghten rule, which establishes what we know as "not guilty by reason of insanity," was stated in England in about 1843, as follows:

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that every man is to be presumed to be sane, and ... that to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.[1]:632

It isn't a ridiculous rule and makes a sort of common sense.  But, given that it was formulated before we knew pretty much jack shit about psychology, and, considering how much we have learned in the intervening 150+ years, it seems like maybe we ought to revisit the whole thing.  All we currently do is nibble around the edges with things like you can't execute someone who is retarded, etc.

It's kind of emblematic of the criminal laws that have mostly gone unchanged, except to create more and more of them, for hundreds of years.

 

And now we have no insane asylums, but a huge percentage of prison inmates suffer from mental illnesses, many of them pretty grave.  I'm not sure that it makes a ton of difference whether someone is locked away for most of their life in a prison or a horrid asylum, but I think we can probably do better.

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