Posted on 03/23/2020 8:08:37 AM PDT by yesthatjallen
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that states can effectively eliminate the insanity defense for criminal defendants who suffer from mental illness.
The 6-3 ruling holds that a Kansas law preventing the exoneration of defendants who claim a diminished mental state is not unconstitutional.
In an unusual alignment for the bench, Justice Elena Kagan, considered among the more liberal justices, wrote the majority opinion and was joined by her five conservative colleagues. Three liberal justices — Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg — dissented.
"Defining the precise relationship between criminal culpability and mental illness involves examining the workings of the brain, the purposes of the criminal law, the ideas of free will and responsibility," Kagan wrote. "It is a project demanding hard choices among values, in a context replete with uncertainty, even at a single moment in time. And it is a project, if any is, that should be open to revision over time, as new medical knowledge emerges and as legal and moral norms evolve.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
This one involving a criminal case kind of caught me off guard.
Good.
Agreed. You don’t get someone committing murder and then getting out of an institution after a few years in a psych ward.
Thank God, closing a vagina card loophole.
Let’s hope the states are smart enough to do this.
I just found this article. Do the guilty get judged innocent because of insanity?
mostly yes...
it is stupid... guilty for reasons of insanity...
i do this in traffic court all the time
judge: how do you plea?
me: not guilty for reasons of insanity.
Judge: you’re crazy.
me: i’d like to call you as my first witness.
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