Personal Perspective on the Insanity Defense
From a personal perspective, the reasonableness of legal protection because of insanity may be regarded as a highly controversial question. On the one hand, according to the M’Naghten rule established in 1843, an individual cannot be legally accountable for murder if he cannot understand the nature of his murderous actions (Keltner & Steele, 2019). On the other hand, it is difficult to define the concept of mental illness that is based on insanity (Boyd & Luebbert, 2020).
In particular, it has two significant elements that may also be regarded as questionable. The first one is incomprehensibility, as the inability of the general public to understand the motivation of an insane individual’s behavior. The second element is cultural relativity, which introduces the cultural aspect of this understanding. In other words, social norms may interpret a person’s behavior as either standard or not normal within the mental health framework. This perspective makes legal protection due to insanity highly questionable due to its establishment based on disputable concepts.
Reasonableness of Legal Protection Under the Law
At the same time, I believe that an individual who commits a serious crime should be isolated from society for others’ safety, especially when an in-depth analysis of mental health demonstrates the possibility of dangerous behavior without any specific reasons. Therefore, I suppose that legal defense should be used whenever necessary. However, it is challenging to agree with the rationale of such protection under the law.
At the same time, everybody should have equal human rights, but the protection of one’s rights for severe crimes seems unfair, especially for the victims’ relatives. At the same time, I understand that the prosecution of insane people is against one of the criminal justice system’s purposes. In other words, while they do not control their actions, they do not clearly understand their mistakes or feel remorseful. Therefore, claiming that insane murderers are not guilty should not mean freedom for them.
References
Boyd, M.A. & Luebbert, R. (2020). Essentials of psychiatric nursing (2nd ed.). Wolters Kluwer.
Keltner, N.L. & Steele, D. (2019). Psychiatric nursing (8th ed.). Mosby. Elsevier, Inc.