Two year's experience under Utah's mens rea insanity law.

Updating toxic psychosis into 21st-century Canadian: Bouchard-Lebrun v. R.

For centuries, Anglo-Saxon common law tradition has tended to limit voluntary intoxication as a defense on both mens rea (so-called diminished capacity defenses) and insanity. A new decision by the Supreme Court of Canada has clarified for Canadian jurisdictions whether voluntary substance-induced psychosis is a mental disorder for the purposes of determining insanity. In the United States, the...

California's diminished capacity defense: evolution and transformation.

Diminished capacity survives in California as a severely attenuated mens rea defense known as diminished actuality. Some other states have similar limited strict mens rea defenses. The lost advantages of California's former expanded concept of diminished capacity are reviewed. As opposed to the all-or-none insanity defense, mens rea defenses permit the trier of fact to find gradations of guilt ...

Abolition of the insanity defense violates due process.

This article, which is based on and expands on an amicus brief the authors submitted to the United States Supreme Court, first provides the moral argument in favor of the insanity defense. It considers and rejects the most important moral counterargument and suggests that jurisdictions have considerable leeway in deciding what test best meets their legal and moral policies. The article then dis...

Culture, Cloaked in Mens Rea

Proof beyond reasonable doubt of the mens rea or state of mind associated with a particular crime is a requirement for the successful prosecution of all criminal defendants under our system of justice. In the legal jargon, it is part of the prosecution’s prima facie case. Concomitantly, criminal defendants may successfully challenge the case against them on the ground (among others) that the pr...

The Uneasy Entente Between Insanity and Mens Rea: Beyond <i>Clark v. Arizona</i>