If serving on a jury and faced with an insanity plea,...

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Who cares? He's guilty! He deserves no less a panalty than the one he imposed on his victims - DEATH.

It matters because this thread is about insane persons accused of criminal actions, not alleged criminals who performed their alleged actions willfully.

Looking at his case briefly, which I admit I haven't followed too closely, it appears that his alleged actions were willful, not the result of insanity. Reading the case summary, there appears to be no mention of mental illness, neither was there any call for restraint or consideration for pleading insanity; instead, his lawyers are going with a pretty long shot plea of simply not guilty, without qualification.

Were the jury to find he committed the alleged actions, the correct verdict would be guilty because of the willfulness of the behavior.

It does not appear that Tsaernav was ever insane, so his case is irrelevant to the topic of this thread: The disposition of insane persons accused of criminal behavior.

I think it's fairly well established that the death penalty is a bad idea (doesn't deter criminals, doesn't reduce murder rates, no possibility of overturning it, costs more than life imprisonment), so I'm surprised when people who make a big show of their own rationalism continue to advocate passionately for it.

The jury should understand it role which is not sentencing, but determining guilt (verdict).

It is not the jury's job to speculate on sentencing then change their verdict based on that.

I despair at the poor understanding of due process, in the population and the makes me concerned about jury demographic. There should be more education on the underlying principle of the law. As at the moment people are more influence by media speculation, and have already made their minds up without hearing the evidence.

You should find someone insane if the person meets the legal definition for insanity in that jurisdiction (which precludes most personality disorder on their own). A insane person required care in a secure hospital.

A sane person or most personality disordered persons would not benefit from this.

I think the in is issue is problematic, because people often confuse the act with madness, or they refuse to accept that someone might be insane, becuase it doesn't satisfy their emotional response.

The case of the Chris Kyle is a classic case where people aren't really looking at the evidence, and noting that this person was actually in a mental hospital before the crime happened, and the general disorder nature of the crime, and the paranoid illogical thinking, with physiological reports. They have the utmost respect for Kyle for the most part, that influences the verdict more than the defendant, the circumstances leading to his death had warning signs, and it remains to be seen how aware Chris Kyle was about that.

The case of the Aurora shooting is different becuase there is clearly a lot pre-planning, and they is also evidence of possibly exaggerating or faking a disorder. There is some evidence of mental illness (pre-existing), but he jury still has to look at the evidence as to if he was able to understand what he is doing. You ca still receive full guilt even if you have some mental illness.

There are other verdicts, which are diminished responsibility, or "temporary insanity" as it is called. This is a more difficult thing to prove. Diminished responsibility might be someone spiking your drink with some drug, that vastly changes your personality and you attack someone at random due to drug fueled psychosis. If you take the drug yourself deliberately you have far more culpability. Other diminished responsibility might be someone with severe learning disabilities killing a child by accident, intending to help it.

Last edited by 0_equals_true on 08 Mar 2015, 8:36 am, edited 1 time in total.

Given the string of case of people being found innocent after year in prison, the death penalty simply is not fit for purpose.

The death penalty is also very expensive. Just look at the spend. Compared to lifers.

The deterrent argument doesn't make sense becuase there is correlation to be found at all. You have every result under the sun. You have places with the death penalty with plenty of homicides, or less or without or more/less. There is zero evidence of a correlation at all. If you think about it the deterrent makes no sense, becuase if some is willing to kill someone they either believe they can get away with it or they don't care and the penalty is far from their minds.

Law of the land and all subjects, not law for the victim or law of emotions.

I did ask some specific questions there that I think would help me understand your position more that you skipped over.

But for murderers and violent/sexual crimes, it does not matter to me what the mindset was as they do not deserve to ever be free again. I am against the death penalty for pragmatic reasons as I agree that it cannot be applied with total certainty in all cases and costs so much but on principle I very much agree with the idea an eye for an eye. Regardless of your circumstances or mind-state you are responsible for the most grave of crimes and I don't believe anybody that murders somebody should be able be able to walk free after they have "recovered". Somebody that shot their girlfriend 3 times in the face at age 17 doesn't deserve to be out in their early 20s and be able to raise a family of their own, that is not justice in my opinion. Its hard for me to have sympathy for these killers and rapists, I think at best they are akin to rabid animals and we all know what we do to rabid animals. They don't even have to be rabid, what do we do with aggressive dogs even? Perhaps you would think differently if this scenario had actually played out in your family as it has mine.

Like I said, you can be guilty and insane. Give them all the risperdal they want in their cage. There are a big difference between the vast majority of mentally ill people who may find themselves behind bars who the system has failed and those that are violent and truly a danger to society. Its just an unfortunate fact about deinstitutionalization that some of the sickest people have been left out in the cold, sometimes an institution is the only place appropriate for these people and the laws and the facilities do not accommodate this segment of the mentally ill population.

You can't actually do justice in a murder case, unless you have a deal with death whereby you can exchange the murderer's life for their victim's. Justice would involve restoring the victim to the state that they were in before the crime, which is impossible in the case of crimes considered heinous - hence why they are considered heinous, because there is no possibility of justice once they have been perpetrated.

The reason murderers are locked up, therefore, is not justice. It's to prevent them from commiting more murders. Or, it should be; far too often it becomes about revenge. We have courts because revenge isn't a good way to go about running society.

The issue is that if the crime is heinous enough that is either extremely unlikely or impossible depending on where you live. In the more severe crimes I agree that stays in a mental health hospital should be at least as long as the conventional prison sentence would be. And I think in the overwhelming majority of cases, that is what happened. I also agree that mental health centers need to be properly equipped to tell who is faking it and who is not.

I think the idea that being sent to a mental health center rather than a prison necessarily means the defendant will not be held accountable is a dangerous misconception. In this case, going to a mental health center means they are guilty by reason of mental insanity and will still be placed on an isolated, restricted center where they get very carefully monitored. The accountability for their crimes is still very much there because it does not mean they are going to be let out on the streets or in public to do whatever they want, whenever they want.

And true enough, those who want to use mental illness as a get out of jail free card will find that being sent to a mental health center for extended periods of time loses appeal quickly enough that simply serving out the conventional prison term becomes more effective. And if every defendant is treated the same regardless of mental health, it can be more difficult to keep the mentally ill who are dangerous to the public isolated since if they are all sentenced to prison terms of solitary confinement, it becomes that much easier to argue against it on the grounds that it is inhumane, particularly for the more capable defense attorneys.

I think we are all in agreement that someone who does a heinous crime like this has to be kept away from the public forever. I think that crimes that cross a certain line need to be given a life sentence in a jail or the equivalent in a mental health center with zero chance of ever being let own because they "show improvement". But there are many other cases where the proper sentencing is about making sure defendants who are mentally disabled do not become more dangerous and violent in the first place.

I think that whether or not a defendant actually fights being placed in a mental health center for the same amount of time he would have served in jail is a good indicator of whether or not that treatment is appropriate. Granted, it is not foolproof but in these cases there is not such thing as a 10) % foolproof way to read defendants since our technology has not allowed us to read minds yet. That said, someone who is not genuinely mentally ill is by and large going to fight the idea of spending the equivalent of their jail sentence in a mental health center or at the very least express some kind of opposition to it. My understanding of the James Holmes case is that he claimed mental insanity but then said he was not mentally insane as soon as it became time top receive mental health treatment. With this waste of life, I would concur that it is clear he is playing the system as hard as he can and the only appropriate sentence, other than the death penalty which I think would make sense for him, is life in a tiny prison box locked as far away from the public as humanly possible.

This is nothing to do with justice, that is not the role of justice.

Law of the land and all subjects, not law of the victim. Like you said, killing the murderer doesn't bring the victim back.

That is precisely what is wrong with legal systems and why there will never be any agreement on how they ought to be implemented; the law is based on irrelevant, arbitrary, and widely interpretable abstractions such as "justice" and "fairness" and what is "deserved" instead of concrete matters of safety and practicality.

So what are you proposing that they use probability and data training to convict someone even it means you getting sent down for something you didn't do, for the good of society?

Last edited by 0_equals_true on 08 Mar 2015, 6:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I am not proposing anything, and I do not even understand the meaning of "use probability to convict someone."

Well you could say that instead of establishing guilt through legal principles you might achieve harm reduction better, if you rely on probability and data training. Although it wouldn't achieve harm reduction to those sent down.

You should be proposing an alternative, if you consider something impractical.

If we can reduce the number of murders by 100, at the price of locking up 50 innocent people, should we do that?

Or to put it another way, if the probability of an individual having NOT committed a murder is less than the probablity that they'll commit a murder if they go free, that is, P(not_guilty) < P(will_commit_murder), should that be sufficient to send them to prison?