Insanity Defense In Court Cases

The insanity defense typically refers to a plea that defendants are not guilty because they lacked the mental capacity to realize that they committed a wrong or appreciate why it was wrong. Some states also allow defendants to argue that they understood their behavior was criminal but were unable to control it. This is sometimes called the "irresistible impulse" defense. When defendants plead not guilty by reason of insanity, they are asserting an affirmative defense—that is, they admit that they committed a criminal act, but seek to excuse their behavior by reason of mental illness that satisfies the definition of legal insanity. People who are adjudged to have been insane at the time they committed a crime are neither legally nor morally guilty. The insanity defense has proven to be a nuisance in several court cases making it difficult to decipher whether or not a defendant is mentally …show more content…
There have been many famous cases regarding the insanity defense. One of the most famous case is the John Hinckley verdict, in which a man who shot U.S. President Ronald Reagan six times in an attempted assassination was found not guilty due to insanity. Hinckley was acquitted of 13 charges of assault, murder, and weapon counts. Because the case was so widely viewed, the final verdict of the case made the public believe that the insanity defense was a loophole in the legal system to allow clearly guilty defendants to escape incarceration. John Hinckley is on the urge of becoming the first man to shoot a president and walk away as a free man after living with the insanity plea for 34 years (www.latimes.com). This shows that even after proving that Hinckley was indeed the shooter in the attempted assassination and even stating to the court his reasoning for doing the shooting, which was to impress actress Jodie Forster, he still lives his life freely, even he is under 24 hour watch by the