Are Mentally Ill People who Commit Egregious Acts Responsible For Their Actions?

[Anonymous No.15406729]

The extreme example is if a schizophrenic person is commanded by God to murder someone. But also, less extreme examples, like if a manic person cheats on their spouse, or assaults someone. If they're not responsible for their actions, what about the consequences? Should they be free from reprisal from the victims? If their act dissolves some sort of relationship, should that relationship be restored after the fact?

There are many examples of these types of characters in /lit/. It could be argued that Raskolnikov was manic. Jekyll and Hyde is perhaps the most iconic example.

[Anonymous No.15407439]

>>15406729
Why would anyone think they are free from reprisal? If a crazy person murders someone then they are locked up in a mental institute instead of a prison, but the effect is the same.

[Anonymous No.15407459]

yes, and i will have my revenge

[Anonymous No.15407468]

>>15406729
If the person is being brainwashed literally no consequences and they can sue the brainwashers.

[Anonymous No.15407485]

>>15406729
In U.S. law, to prosecute a criminal activity there generally needs to be a mental state (mens rea) and an action (actus reus). Right, so if you didn't mean to hit the dude with the car, it's not murder, it's man slaughter because man slaughter requires reckless action while murder has to be knowingly. Each state does a slightly different test for the insanity defense, some more narrow than others, and it generally has to be that their mental deficit has to be so intense they were unaware that what they did was legally/morally wrong. This gets you sent away to a crazy person facility generally for many years. The other defense is that the defendant is incompetent at time of trial. If someone is too retarded to understand a trial going on, you can't really do a trial and respect their rights. All of this is neo-liberal bullshit though because we work within systems based on presuppositions that maintain the system. If we look at the hammurabi code, it didn't really give a fuck about intent and prescribed murder/death for most actions. So I suppose we have to ask, what is your real question? Is it about the actual society you live in and how it currently works or what the right system should be? Are you asking for an IS or an OUGHT?

[Anonymous No.15407523]

Take a look at the history of insanity defense. Those who are proven to being unable to distinguish right and wrong usually face psychiatric confinement for way longer than they would have been in an incarceration after being cleared as “not guilty”.

[Anonymous No.15407535]

>>15407523
No shit.
Claiming to be criminally insane isn't a get out of jail free card you are publicly arguing that you are unfit for society and a demonstrable danger.
What an incredibly stupid thread this is.

[Anonymous No.15407543]

>>15406729
Raskolnikov did nothing wrong.

[Anonymous No.15407546]

>>15406729
I'd kill them just to be certain.

[Anonymous No.15407566]

>>15407546
That's actually more humane that keeping them locked up in dreary shithole asylum so they can be some psychiatrists guinea pig for the rest of their life.

[Anonymous No.15407581]

>>15407566
Yeah but the latter is more useful for society

[Anonymous No.15407590]

>>15407566
Well, I am quite the humanitarian.

[Anonymous No.15407598]

if this is a question about what is right: even if someone is mentally ill, they should still be held accountable for their actions. there is no reason to be exempt from this—plenty of rapists and murderers are mentally ill, and while it is terribly sad that this is often the case because they slipped through the healthcare/public benefits system's cracks (and perhaps the crimes would have otherwise been prevented), living consequence-free helps no one. nobody is owed a restored relationship after hurting someone, even if they hurt the other person in some kind of altered state. the effect is still harm, and whether someone is institutionalized or jailed, they're facing consequences in some way. (i would say for people totally mentally unable to understand the implications or consequences of anything they do still ought to be cared for in isolation if they assault or murder someone or something but generally people who are this low-functioning do not have spouses or many friendships to commit lower social offenses like cheating on a spouse etc.)

i mean, the ideal system would be able to care for society's sickest people and then have some means of rehabilitation or permanent care/treatment solutions failing that but as it stands today there needs to be some way to address crimes committed by the mentally ill.

[Anonymous No.15407613]

>>15407546
Ok so how do you deal with false indictments found later down the road due to lawyers gaming a retarded jury with aggressive methods

[Anonymous No.15407621]

>>15407581
Not really.
You're really naive if you think any sort of research or progress is being made here.

[Anonymous No.15407622]

>>15407459
Even your own dad admits I have a prettier and more feminine butt than his wife. I would be a much more beautiful woman than you. Face it.

[Anonymous No.15407631]

>>15407613
I'd then kill the lawyers for being dishonest and the jury for being stupid.

[Anonymous No.15407645]

>>15407631
And then you'd teleport behind me and kill me?

[Anonymous No.15407659]

>>15406729
What does it matter that the person is mentally ill or not if we know he's dangerous?
An accidental kill that cannot be predicted or prevented is one thing, but if it's intentional you better get rid of the murdered to guarantee your safety.

[Anonymous No.15407662]

>>15407645
I would, if the scientists working on the teleporter were not already killed for fucking up while they were on jury.

[Anonymous No.15407664]

If they're aware of their condition and do nothing to protect others, yes.

[Anonymous No.15407665]

>>15407621
Nah, you’re just being stubborn because either ethical or ideological reasons. Psychiatric and psychological research does progress slowly and surely. You’re disagreement isn’t founded on anything else except ideology.

[Anonymous No.15407669]

If you step on a bug and kill it, but you were unable to understand the bug was there or care about its well being, are you still responsible for stepping on it?

[Anonymous No.15407705]

>>15407631
What if the lawyers don’t have all the evidence from their clients?

[Anonymous No.15407742]

>>15406729
Worked a while in a closed psychiatry ward for schizophrenic/bipolar patients, saw a lot of violent offenders and one murderer. Most patients, mind you, are just unfortunate victims of their sickness and would never harm fly though.
Getting better a violent patient who acted under the influence of delusions/dissociation was the okay part, seeing them go free or part free was the hard one; so hard to know if he'll do the necessary stuff to stay well... The real issue is when their disease is paired with psychopathic/sociopathic traits, or an overly weak IQ : it's an unpredictable combo and the danger is never really gone.

[Anonymous No.15407748]

>>15407665
what do you think psychiatric institutions are like? a lot of times they are just holding pens. the creation of the IRB stopped a lot of this 'progress' from happening. you can't just lobotomize people to see what will happen, and you can't obtain consent from most institutionalized schizophrenics or otherwise incredibly unstable persons to participate in a study. most psychiatric research takes place on a voluntary basis, that is to say on non-institutionalized patients with the ability to consent. i suppose you can do things like monitor symptoms etc. but psychotropic drugs are a crapshoot anyways and if you think that psychiatric wards are full of human guinea pigs you're mistaken. i won't deny that progress in psychology and psychiatry is possible but it probably won't take place in a psych ward. the mental health industry is leaning further towards deinstitutionalization as a goal every day and incentivizing longer holding periods and potential recidivism by providing endless research subjects (i say this because describing them as laboratory rats basically implies that you're not thinking about institutional vs. post-institutional outcome studies—it seems you mean drugs and therapy testing primarily) doesn't really make sense. i don't think that the dynamics of power in a psychiatric hospital make ethical medical research possible (most of the time) in that setting.

[Anonymous No.15407751]

>>15407705
Because the clients failed to provide the evidence? Kill the clients for failing to provide the proper grounds for the procedure, and the lawyer for being too incompetent to torture it out of them.
Come on, give me a tougher one.

[Anonymous No.15407762]

>>15407622
Projection is when you hate some part of yourself but you decide to pretend it doesn’t exist and hate others because they have that part instead. Are you feeling ok anon?

[Anonymous No.15407770]

>>15407665
also i'm not the guy you were responding to and yes this is stubbornness from an ethical perspective but i also think that medical ethics and research ethics guidelines exist for a purpose—research should not come at the cost of human life and making a value judgment on whose life matters is dangerous territory for science

[Anonymous No.15407775]

>>15407751
What if the murderer is a super psycho and acts super innocent to the lawyer who advocates aggressively on his behalf andgets the innocent person killed?

[Anonymous No.15407791]

>>15407775
Well, have we learned that the procedure was botched? If yes - lawyer was incompetent and dishonest, client was dishonest - both are executed.

[Anonymous No.15407806]

>>15406729
In a technical sense yes they are because their disordered brain was responsible for the egregious act. Regardless of the influences, they pulled the trigger, swung the sword, raped, etc.

[Anonymous No.15407816]

>>15407751
Also, what if the plaintiff is a young girl that was exposed to a ton of porn and touches herself too much and dies and the defendant gets killed for being falsely accused as a pedo killer man? (That’s an actual historic case minus the death btw)

Should we have killed the crazy ppl so fast if they aren’t fit for trial or aren’t capable of communicating key information?

[Anonymous No.15407820]

>>15407622
my dad is drunk i don't care what he says

[Anonymous No.15407821]

>>15407748
>>15407770
I don’t necessarily agree nor diagree here. The IRB protects the participants rights and im certain the criminally insane arent willing or capable of consenting. But the research being done there isn’t experimental anymore. They’re there to be treated and they dont need to consent to that, because that’s their sentencing. The research conducted there is on a case study basis, what worked and what didn’t. I rather the criminally insane are kept in wards instead of prisons or killed by the state because at the very least there is someone who can serve as a way to empirically gather data to test the validity of actual expeirmental or theoretical research. I wish there were less restriction from the IRB and I do wish that as a society we were willing to think a little less of the criminally insane so that we can advance faster.

[Anonymous No.15407823]

They have a responsibility to deal with the consequences of their condition, as do all humans.

[Anonymous No.15407826]

>>15407791
Lawyers just doing his job though :( how’s he supposed to account for something like that and how’re you gonna kill the indicted so immediately

[Anonymous No.15407833]

Mentally ill people are the responsibility of their community. We used to have a simple solution for them before Christianity, they would be wizards and villagers would bring them food for their wisdom

[Anonymous No.15407938]

>>15407821
yeah, i do see what you mean but i'd like to believe that a lot of the changes in experimental design are a product of the IRB, and loosening up the protections of research subjects may have awful consequences. as it stands, a lot of doctors initially misdiagnose psychiatric patients and so bipolar patients may be given SSRIs, triggering psychotic mania and so on…and so i think were we to allow experimentation on these patients the results of the experiments they may fall under the "cruel and unusual" category bringing the sentence closer to torture. i can't bring myself to square any potential research gains with dehumanization. i think it is easy in the face of progress to lose sight of how we treat others along the way, and while i see your point about wanting to lighten up restrictions, i think that devaluing anyone, no matter how convenient it may be, could have a snowball effect. (i'm imagining a scenario where a pharmaceutical to treat say, schizophrenia is merely being tested for side-effects at a certain stage and so it is economically incentivized for more doctors to falsely diagnose prisoners etc.) it results in the creation of a slave class of cannon-fodder that is ever widening and will ultimately come down on poor people—it's just too exploitative.

[Anonymous No.15407973]

>>15406729
Absolutely not. Nevertheless, they should be punished so that society's thirst for retribution is kept in check and does not turn to the state.