Judge rules man who killed Alberta peace officer not crimina

[Jeffrey]

http://www.brandonsun.com/national/brea ... html?thx=y

Found this while digging around the news archive. Fairly astonishing

[Famspear]

The M'Naghten defense rule, or insanity defense rule, is pretty standard.

If, at the time of the conduct, the defendant suffered from a mental disease or defect that rendered him incapable of knowing or appreciating the nature or consequences of his conduct, or incapable of being able to tell right from wrong with respect to that conduct, then under the English and American criminal justice systems, he generally would have lacked the mens rea, or guilty mind, if any, required for a criminal conviction.

EDIT: And, I assume that this is the rule in Canada.

[fortinbras]

The M'Naghtan Rule (which is spelled a variety of ways - who's to say that a crazy man spells his own name correctly?) (inability to tell right from wrong) has slowly yielded to the Durham Rule (irresistible impulse) and, recently, to some other standards of insanity.

A very real question is whether any simple standard of insanity, of the sort that can be entrusted to jurors, is really reliable. There are an enormous number of rather obviously mentally ill people being sent to prison where, predictably, they will NOT be treated or rehabilitated and will probably come out worse than when they entered.

[Fmotlgroupie]

That is, basically, the rule in Canada. This seems to have been a more or less uncontested issue (ie the Crown didn't disagree that he was Not Criminally Responsible). Very very sad but it is what it is.

The interesting point is that the Government of Alberta mandates that Peace Officers like this one go out and enforce the law unarmed, and without access to normal police databases. There hasn't been much discussion of that in local media but I think it merits a very long, very hard look.

[rosvicl]

If it's like the United States, the killer could still be confined for life: to get out, he/his attorney would have to convince the authorities that he was no longer insane in the specific sense being used here.

As fortinbras noted, this isn't insanity in a medical sense (let alone how laypeople use the term): U.S. prisons are full of mentally ill people who weren't offered other treatment or psychiatric support and couldn't manage without it. Most of them get little, if any, treatment or other help in prison, and it's no surprise that they tend to come out in worse shape than when they were locked up.