A Plea or Insane?

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Each level of crime has an appropriate level of punishment and while a person maybe insane they cannot be allowed to resist punishment for their crimes. Even the few that are successfully acquitted under insanity pleas find themselves enduring a punishment of kinds with constant testing and evaluating within a psychiatric hospital. If their insanity makes them a danger to society and offers the likelihood they will repeat offend then they are likely to spend their entire life in a secure hospital, when, for example, in a case of murder the prison term would likely be a lesser stay of twenty years.

In 1994, just two years after being committed to a prison term of 15 consecutive life sentences without a chance of parol for the murder of fifteen young men Jeffery Dahmer was himself murdered by a fellow inmate. In 1991 Jefferey Dahmer found himself convicted of the murders when the young men’s mutilated and cannibalised bodies had been found in his American apartment. Having reportedly had sex with some of the corpses, attempted to perform crude lobotomies on others while they were still alive and stored some of the body parts in his fridge to be consumed at a later date. During the trial he had admitted the killings but pled not guilty due to reasons of insanity, he plea rejected by a jury who found him sane at the time of the murders. A case now infamously known for the hailing by many as the death of the insanity defence on a basis that if such a clearly deranged killer could not be found legally insane, it seemed unlikely that the defence would ever be successful, at least in a high profile case.

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Psychosis (from the Greek psyche and osis – abnormal condition) is the term used for people who suffer from an inability to appreciate reality, created by a number of factors such as genetic abnormalities, head injury or drug abuse. People suffering from Psychosis are often delusional, unemotional, living in a private conjured life far removed from and unaffected by the normal world around them, the most commonly known being Schizophrenia.  Psychosis can be broken down into three common forms namely Schizophrenia (emotional, perceptual, thought and motor disturbances), Schizoaffective Disorder (a combination of Schizophrenia symptoms coupled with depressive mood swings) and Bi-polar Disorder (often the initial diagnosis of Schizoaffective disorder, it’s symptoms similar with the addition of excessive talkativeness, loss of sleep, inflated self esteem and harmful risk taking).

Someone suffering from Schizophrenia may experience

a. emotional disturbances induced by abnormal genetics, early environment or defective neurons (brain cells the transmit and receive electrochemical impulses).

b. psychological and social processing are also important contributory factors which lead to the sufferers inability to recognise, understand or display expected emotions in a given situation.

Perceptual disturbances that can include auditory and visual hallucinations which studies have shown are not usually treatable by naloxone hydrochloride(a narcotic with anti hallucinatory properties).  Schizoaffective disorder a combination of thought, mood, and anxiety disorder, requires a combination of antipsychotic, antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications. While drug therapy can usually stop the patient’s psychosis, they often require social and occupational rehabilitation therapies to help with the associated unemployment and poverty problems.

Anti-social personality disorder /APD or psychotic personality can be categorised by a lack of regard for the feelings of others, an inability to form relationships or take responsibility believed by theorists to be caused as a direct reaction to the lack of parental love during infancy.

DSM (The diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, issued by the American Psychiatric Association first published in 1952. Essentially a check list of symptoms and criteria for each illness is the most commonly used guide to mental health disorders.

Those suspected of suffering mental illness can be evaluated through psychological assessment to determine whether a person is currently competent in the ability to knowingly make decisions, assist an attorney in the preparation of a case against them. It is the forensic psychologists job to ascertain whether a defendant can be held legally responsible for his criminal actions. Defendants found not to possess sufficient “competence” are usually excluded from criminal prosecution.