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Full-Text Articles in Criminology
Are We Responsible For Who We Are? The Challenge For Criminal Law Theory In The Defenses Of Coercive Indoctrination And "Rotten Social Background", Paul H. Robinson
Are We Responsible For Who We Are? The Challenge For Criminal Law Theory In The Defenses Of Coercive Indoctrination And "Rotten Social Background", Paul H. Robinson
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Should coercive indoctrination or "rotten social background" be a defense to crime? Traditional desert-based excuse theory roundly rejects these defenses because the offender lacks cognitive or control dysfunction at the time of the offense. The standard coercive crime-control strategies of optimizing general deterrence or incapacitation of the dangerous similarly reject such defenses. Recognition of such defenses would tend to undermine, perhaps quite seriously, deterrence and incapacitation goals. Finally, the normative crime-control principle of empirical desert might support such an excuse, but only if the community's shared intuitions of justice support it. The law’s rejection of such defenses suggests that there …
Abnormal Mental State Mitigations Or Murder – The U.S. Perspective, Paul H. Robinson
Abnormal Mental State Mitigations Or Murder – The U.S. Perspective, Paul H. Robinson
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This paper examines the U.S. doctrines that allow an offender's abnormal mental state to reduce murder to manslaughter. First, the modern doctrine of "extreme emotional disturbance," as in Model Penal Code Section 210.3(1)(b), mitigates to manslaughter what otherwise would be murder when the killing "is committed under the influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance for which there is reasonable explanation or excuse." While most American jurisdictions are based upon the Mode Code, this is an area in which many states chose to retain their more narrow common law "provocation" mitigation. Second, the modern doctrine of "mental illness negating an …
Two Cheers, Not Three For Sixth Amendment Originalism, Stephanos Bibas
Two Cheers, Not Three For Sixth Amendment Originalism, Stephanos Bibas
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