The insanity defense is one of the oldest fixtures of the Anglo-American legal tradition. Though it is available to people charged with virtually any crime, and is often employed without controversy, homicide defendants who raise the insanity defense are often viewed by the public and even the legal system as trying to get away with murder. Often it seems that legal result of an insanity defense is unpredictable, and is determined not by the defendants mental state, but by their lawyers and psychologists influence. From the thousands of murder cases in which defendants have claimed insanity, Doctor Ewing has chosen ten of the most influential and widely varied. Some were successful in their insanity plea, while others were rejected. Some of the defendants remain household names years after the fact, like Jack Ruby, while others were never nationally publicized. Regardless of the circumstances, each case considered here was extremely controversial, hotly contested, and relied heavily on lengthy testimony by expert psychologists and psychiatrists. Several of them played a major role in shaping the criminal justice system as we know it today. In this book, Ewing skillfully conveys the psychological and legal drama of each case, while providing important and fresh professional insights. For the legal or psychological professional, as well as the interested reader, Insanity will take you into the minds of some of the most incomprehensible murderers of our age.

Criminal law has struggled to keep pace with developments in psychiatry, both in substantive and procedural terms, and it is widely recognised that increased inter-disciplinary discussion of mental condition defences is required in order to address this gap between the law and psychiatry. This edited collection comes at a time of review of this sensitive area of criminal law. The Law Commission for England and Wales recently placed its evaluation of insanity, automatism and intoxication on hold, while it considers the law on unfitness to plead. These reviews are set against the backdrop of earlier Law Commission reports on partial defences to murder which informed significant changes that were made to the law in this area under sections 52–56 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. Recent developments in case law in this substantive area illustrate not only the importance of the role of the medical expert, but also that reform in this area is informed by ongoing inter-disciplinary research. This collection brings together medical and legal conceptions of mental disorder in order to appraise the operation of mental condition defences. In this respect, it provides invaluable and original insights into mental condition defences and criminal law.

Distributive principles of criminal law -- Habitual offender statutes -- Death penalty -- Legality requirement -- Provocation/extreme emotional disturbance -- Felony murder -- Causation -- Transferred intent -- Consent to injury -- Mental illness negating an offense element (MINOE) -- Attempt -- Complicity -- Complicity liability of co-conspirators -- Lesser evils/necessity defense -- Self-defense -- Law enforcement authority -- Insanity defense -- Immaturity defense -- Statute of limitations -- Exclusionary rule -- Entrapment defense -- Criminalizing risk creation -- Statutory rape -- Domestic violence, spousal rape exemption -- Stalking and harassment -- Child neglect -- Deceptive business practices -- Extortion -- Adultery -- Criminal obscenity -- Child pornography -- Drug offenses -- Firearms possession offenses -- Antitrust predatory pricing -- Organized crime -- Fixing sporting events -- Extradition -- Jurisdiction

Discusses the criminal responsibility of the mentally ill, looks at involuntary conduct, and argues that mental illness should affect sentencing, but not determine guilt or innocence

This book challenges the assumptions of modern criminal law that insanity is a natural, legally and medically defined phenomenon (covering a range of medical disorders). By doing so, it paves the way for a new perspective on insanity and can serve as the basis for a new approach to insanity in modern criminal law. The book covers the following aspects: the structure of the principle of fault in modern criminal law, the development of the insanity defense in criminal law, tangential in personam defenses in criminal law and their implications for insanity and the legal mechanism of reproduction of fault. The focus is on the Anglo-American and European-Continental legal systems. Given the attention consistently drawn by international and domestic events in this context, the book will be of interest to a broad and growing international audience.