Abstract
Personality disorders may affect intelligence and free will and therefore imply a criminal imputability alteration. However, Spanish jurisprudence does not follow a general rule when assessing personality disorders’ influence on criminal liability. By reviewing 77 Spanish Supreme Court decisions, we present in this paper a descriptive and retrospective study on how jurisprudence understands and assesses personality disorders. Paranoid, borderline, unspecified and antisocial personality disorders are in practice the more often applied constructs, but they do not imply full exculpation. In comorbidity cases courts usually recognise partial exculpatory defenses or attenuate punishment in reasoning by similarity and analogy to mental disorder. In personality disorder cases sentences, disorders of that kind have a relative influence on measuring penalties – courts impose, if so, a minimum sentence at its lower half or, at most, at only one grade under the minimum grade. Imposing security measures for diminished capacity cases related to personality disorders is exceptional.
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