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Insanity

In: Social Issues

Submitted By Thiernho
Words 460
Pages 2
Insanity Defense Before talking about insanity defense, I will define the world insanity first, which is something that people do to protect himself or herself without realizing the gravity or without realizing what he/she does when the action happens. It’s like a senseless action or mistake.
Therefore, I did a little research about the “insanity defense”. Beside of my research I found that “the insanity defense in criminal term is where the defendant claims they are not responsible for their actions due to mental health problems”. Do they have to believe what the defendant says about that he/she is or was insane? I say no they have to make a test to show his/her insanity. As I say the law should brings something that show people or to prove the insanity of the defendant. Nonetheless the American law has come out with something that can prove or indentify the insanity of defendant like: M’Naghten Rule, the model penal code etc…
In Maryland they uses model penal code to show if the defendant is was insane at the time he did the action.
First the all the test of M’Naghten is “a test applied to determine whether a person accused of a crime was sane at the time of its commission and, therefore, criminal responsible for the wrongdoing.” (Queen v. M'Naghten, 8 Eng. Rep. 718 [1843]). The next test is the model penal code is the test that shows people that a defendant is not responsible for his/her act at the time he/she did the murder or something.
Beside of my research I found that the cases of the insanity plea. “In 1982 in Idaho John Joseph Delling, killed two people, one in Moscow and one in Boise but his lawyers contend that he did so while under delusions brought on by acute paranoid schizophrenia. Since then Idaho passed a law abolishing the insanity defense at trial”. In fact the insanity defense is available to defendants in criminal term. Some people thing that insanity defense is used every day and every moment but it is not the case. In my research “an eight-state study, the insanity defense is used in less than 1% of all court cases. When they used, they came out with just 26% success rate. They must decrease the rate again because they should think about the family of the victim. In otherwise it can bring more violence in our society.

Work cited http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insanity_defense http://crime.about.com/od/issues/a/insanity.htm http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-procedure/the-insanity-defense-among-the-states.html http://magicvalley.com/news/opinion/editorial/our-view-time-to-revisit--year-old-insanity-plea/article_3799b4e5-c7ce-5204-8133-38cd55f0d7a0.html

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