For as long as the media has taken note of such instances, school violence, specifically school shootings by pseudocommandos (school shooters who shoot others for revenge), has been a hot topic to cover. In several instances, the shooters have plead for insanity in argument that they were not sane at the time of the massacre and could not identify what was wrong from right. These pleas have become a fall-back argument for some of the pseudocommandos, and in doing so, a select few were found guilty of murder, but the consequences of the massacres committed were eased. In the end, after the school rampages, or SR’s, were committed, the true ethics of the treatment of the shooters must come into question in regards to the insanity plea. How …show more content…
This percentage which seems high is actually miniscule, for out of all felony cases, regardless of whether the crime was a school shooting, only one percent of all felonies in county court cases have involved the insanity plea. The accepted pleas followed many guidelines to be accepted, and for the majority of the time, the defendants faced strict jurors, whose legal decisions are often decided by their personal beliefs. Moral and ethical opinions often make the results very skewed, and more often than not, the murderers do not win acquittals. Of course, jurors have less or more grounds in some areas over others to accept or deny pleas for insanity, differences that primarily have to do with how individual states’ laws interpret insanity, or if they even allow the plea to be argued at all. Though the law finds the insanity plea to have different meanings in various states, one thing is certain: it almost never passes, such as the plea with the Chardon High School shooter in February of …show more content…
Often, just like the juries, the morals and ethics of the judges often affect the outcomes of court trials. In a study by researchers at the University of Nevada in Reno, they found that an “individual’s understanding of her religion’s teachings concerning punishment (e.g., the death penalty) may affect her decisions.” Most of the time, judges have religious views that affect their judgment. Even of the Supreme Court judges, 118 of them in total since the Supreme Court’s beginning, 81 percent have identified as a denomination of Protestant Christian. This lack of diversity tends to lean the court in certain directions, and in the case of school shootings, in the direction of finding the defendants to be guilty. In considering the verdict of a defendant, judges often have to make their decisions based on various factors, and “must incorporate a considerable diversity of elements in order to form an opinion of the defendant's guilt,” one of which being how cruel the act