Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law

with respect to his occupation (i.e., objectively he was

not an FBI official) and his rights and duties associ-

ated with his occupation (i.e., objectively he did not

have the authority to commandeer a public transporta-

tion vehicle in the interest of national security). The

nature of these distortions impaired his ability to

judge correctly with respect to the action of taking

control over the bus.

This formulation lacks a conclusive opinion as to

whether or not the defendant’s symptoms at the time

of the offense satisfy the required predicate condition

(“he suffered from a mental disease”). Also absent is

any conclusory opinion that the symptoms categori-

cally did, or did not, relate to the criminal act in the

prescribed way (i.e., “he did not know that what he

was doing was wrong”). However, the formulation

does provide a plausible accounting of the relation-

ship between the defendant’s symptoms and the crim-

inal behavior, but leaves it to the jury to “connect the

dots,” so to speak, in a fashion congruent with their

collective social and moral intuitions as to whether or

not an individual so disturbed should be held crimi-

nally responsible.

Norman G. Poythress

See also Automatism; Criminal Responsibility, Defenses and

Standards; Forensic Assessment

Further Readings

De Pauw, K. W., & Szulecka, T. K. (1988). Dangerous

delusions: Violence and misidentification syndromes.

British Journal of Psychiatry, 152,91–96.

Dreher, R. H. (1967). Origin, development and present status

of insanity as a defense to criminal responsibility in the

common law. Journal of the History of the Behavioral

Sciences, 3,47–57.

Goldstein, A. M., Morse, S. J., & Shapiro, D. L. (2003).

Evaluation of criminal responsibility. In A. M. Goldstein

(Ed.),Handbook of psychology: Vol. 11. Forensic

psychology(pp. 381–406). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Morse, S. J. (1994). Causation, compulsion, and

involuntariness. Bulletin of the American Academy of

Psychiatry and the Law, 22,159–180.

Morse, S. J. (1994). Culpability and control. University of

Pennsylvania Law Review, 142,1587–1655.

Poythress, N. G. (2004). “Reasonable medical certainty”:

Can we meet Daubertstandards in insanity cases?

[Editorial]. Journal of the American Academy of

Psychiatry and the Law, 32,228–230.

Slobogin, C. (2007). Proving the unprovable: The role of law,

science, and speculation in adjudicating culpability and

dangerousness.New York: Oxford University Press.

CRIMINALRESPONSIBILITY,

DEFENSES ANDSTANDARDS

Although the insanity defense is numerically insignif-

icant, it remains profoundly important to the criminal

justice system as the focal point of the ongoing debate

on the relationship between legal responsibility, free

will, mental illness, and punishment. The insanity

defense has substantially survived in spite of persis-

tent philosophical and political criticism. Its history

reflects a balance and tension between changes in atti-

tudes toward developments in psychiatry and psychol-

ogy and changes in attitudes toward criminal justice,

incapacitation, and the desire to punish. Probably no

other area of criminal law and procedure reflects a

jurisprudence that is so driven by myths as that of the

insanity defense. Yet only a handful of American juris-

dictions have legislatively abolished it.

Insanity defense issues have concerned the courts

and legislative bodies for hundreds (perhaps thou-

sands) of years. As the various tests have developed—

M’Naghten, irresistible impulse; Durham, the test

proposed in the American Law Institute’s Model

Penal Code (ALI-MPC); the federal Insanity Defense

Reform Act, diminished capacity—and as efforts are

made to limit the scope and use of the defense, either

by use of a “guilty but mentally ill” verdict or by out-

right abolition, it is clear that the symbolic values of

the insanity defense must be considered carefully at

all times. No area of our legal system has engendered

a more intense level of debate than the role of the

insanity defense in the criminal justice process. On

the one hand, this difficult subject is seen as a reflec-

tion of the fundamental moral principles of the crimi-

nal law, resting on beliefs about human rationality,

deterrability (i.e., whether the punishment of a person

whose profound mental illness leads him to commit

what would otherwise be a criminal act would serve as

a deterrent to others), and free will, and as a bulwark

of the law’s moorings of condemnation for moral fail-

ure. On the other hand, it is castigated by a former

attorney general of the United States as the major

stumbling block in the restoration of “the effective-

ness of Federal law enforcement” and as tilting the

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