Culpable mental disorder and criminal liability

Abstract

Anglo-American criminal laws allow accused persons to reduce or avoid criminal liability by demonstrating that they were affected by a disability of mind at the time of the offense. For such disabilities, including anger, drug impairment and automatism to be effective as defenses, an accused must prove to the court that the relevant state of mind was involuntarily incurred. When the accused’s passionate anger is an unavoidable response to provocation, culpability is reduced; unprovoked anger may be equally impairing but it is not equally excusing. Similarly, accidental drug impairment is much more exculpating than an identical disability of mind wilfully created by the accused. Automatism cases also discriminate between inadvertent causes, such as a blow to the head, and culpable circumstances involving drugs or jealous rages. These familiar legal distinctions are not applied to mental illness because the law now assumes that genuine mental illness is always inadvertent.’ According to orthodox opinion the mentally ill are victims of inescapable determinants and tend to be regarded as especially dangerous and irrational.Z Challenging the orthodox view, I will argue that the mentally ill are not irrational or particularly dangerous, and that most neuroses and psychoses are indirectly advertent. The thesis to be analysed is that mental illness is the psychological equivalent of the hangover, depression, addictive compulsion and ill-health associated with excessive drug consumption. If mental illness is in some part the result of a rational, though excessive pursuit of psychological satisfactions, then the current legal treatment of the mentally ill will have to be revised. From their review of the law, Fingarette and Hasse conclude that a disability of the mind is nonculpable only when it is involuntarily induced,” and that the present legal view of drug addiction is unsound because addiction is the in-