Jane Hanna
Mr. Matlock
Criminal Law 1
September 1, 2014 Insanity Defense: Support it or Abolish it?

Should the United States of America keep or abolish the Insanity Defense? “In criminal trials, the insanity defenses are possible defenses by excuse, an affirmative defense by which defendants argue that they should not be held criminally liable for breaking the law because they were legally insane at the time of the commission of alleged crimes. A defendant attempting such a defense will often be required to undergo a mental examination beforehand. The legal definition of "insane" is, in this context, quite different from psychiatric definitions of "mentally ill". When the insanity defense is successful, the defendant is usually committed to a psychiatric hospital”.(Princeton.edu). Insanity can be faked, the “insane” people can control themselves and should know what they are doing at the moment, and also it can be used an excuse to not go to jail at the moment and go to insanity camp where they have more freedom and have a lesser of their charge. Could insanity be faked? Well that is a question that could be answered with several different conclusions. But the main answer that follows this question really well is that people are very clever and underhanded. People are clever in many different ways, people make bombs in the tiniest forms that fit under your fingernail, they rob banks within the center-meter of the second, and people can control a plane with a computer while the planes in the air. So doesn't the government of law know that people can do the simplest thing as to fake to be insane. The government of law is smart enough to know that and intelligent enough to know if someone is faking it or they are really mentally insane. “The preliminary hearing this week for James Eagan Holmes, the perennially shooter murdered 12 and injured 58 during a July 20, 2012, rampage in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, is once again raising questions about the insanity defense. I suspect that the public often doesn’t understand a key point in insanity cases. The determining factor is not whether a person has a mental disorder or even the severity of his illness. It is whether his mental illness prevented him from being able to tell the difference between right and wrong or they are just counterfeiting it” (Peteearley.com). This example is a representation about how a “perennially shooter” claims to the insanity defense, when obviously he is a repeated shooter. He is an austere criminal, he does not have any mental/insane issues and does not have an excuse of what he did. He did a crime and he needs to accept on what he did and take the charges. So can insanity be faked? Its an affirmative. Could being insane be an excuse to get a lesser of a charge? Since the insanity rule came out into a law in 1843 by the british, it has been used on 2/3 of the time in the court of law. “Not guilty by reason of insanity” means that because the person is “insane” they did not know what they were doing at the time of the crime and they shouldn't be charged with the same crime as a real felon. I utterly do not agree with this statement. The reason why I don't agree with the statement is because