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Rethinking Legally Relevant Mental Disorder, Christopher Slobogin
Rethinking Legally Relevant Mental Disorder, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The law insists on maintaining mental disorder as a predicate for a wide array of legal provisions, in both the criminal justice system and the civil law. Among adults, only a person with a "mental disease or defect" can escape conviction for an intentional, unjustified crime on grounds of cognitive or volitional impairment.' Only people with "mental illness" or "mental disorder" may be subjected to indeterminate preventive commitment based on dangerousness. Under the laws of many states, only people with a mental disorder are prevented from making decisions about treatment, criminal charges, wills, contracts, and a host of other important …
An End To Insanity: Recasting The Role Of Mental Disability In Criminal Cases, Christopher Slobogin
An End To Insanity: Recasting The Role Of Mental Disability In Criminal Cases, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This article argues that mental illness should no longer be the basis for a special defense of insanity. Instead, mental disorder should be considered in criminal cases only if relevant to other excuse doctrines, such as lack of mens rea, self-defense and duress, as those defenses have been defined under modern subjectively-oriented codes. With the advent of these subjectively defined doctrines (a development which, ironically, took place during the same period that insanity formulations expanded), the insanity defense has outlived its usefulness, normatively and practically. Modern official formulations of the defense are overbroad because, fairly construed, they exculpate the vast …