The Relevancy of Diminished Responsibility
Diminished Responsibility (In the USA it is called Diminished
Capacity) is used to reduce the charge of Murder to Manslaughter thus
allowing the judge more discretion in sentencing. To many the idea of
a person having diminished responsibility to a crime is a problem at
an emotional and rational level : after all we often do not agree what
the mind is !
Some see the defence as a conspiracy of the legal and medical
professions to release increasingly guilty offenders into the
community and that this conspiracy is driven by money and socialists.
Victims and their relatives certainly take a dim view of the mental
defences and see society in terms of becoming increasingly lawless and
heading for Armageddon . Philosophers and theologians point out that
we really know very little about anything, and what is truth anyway ?
Moore in Act and crime discusses the connection of Volition and Act
and whether in fact volitions are an essential source of action . " If
however, volition is taken to refer to a faculty of will that as an
object causes bodily movements, then we must think that person
possesses a kind of unique causal power." 1 That is, is there a sort
of desire or wish? However there is the problem of whether volition is
an active state in the mind or whether it is a mental state, like a
thought , that just comes to one. Moore puts it as "Volitions are
simply the last executors both of our more general intentions and of
the background states of desire and belief that those more general
intentions themselves execute." 2 . This does not consider the
connections between the object of the v...
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...rsation with Dr John Mendenhall, MD ( via e-mail )
Psychiatric Association of Great Falls 2800 11th Ave South #23 Great
Falls, MT 59404
8 Victorian Law Reform Commission (Australia) , Report No 34
9 Draft of the Criminal law Consolidation ( Mental Impairment )
Amendment Bill (No 1) 1994 . South Australian State Government .
10 Ibid No 53
11 CampbellD T , " Mental Health Law: Institutionalised Discrimination
" Australian and New ZealandJournal of Psychiatry 1994 ,Vol 28, No 4
P554
12 Roseman S, "Mental Health Law : an idea whose time has passed "
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 1994 Vol 28, No4 P
560
13 Weinstock R , " Retention of Imperfect Self- Defense In California
Diminished Capacity despite Elimination of Diminished Capacty "
Newsletter AAPL , Vol 19 No3 , December 1994 p57
It is important that every challenge life gives us should be encountered and resolved. Challenges are given to every human being, whether it be a dysfunctional family or a uniquely vibrant family we must face all that comes our way. We must face the daunting challenge of attempting to understand, forgive and to take responsibility, which is brilliantly attempted to do in the novel The Glass Castle.
The CIT was first introduced by David Lykken in 1959 and originally named the Guilty Knowledge Test (GKT). Opposite to the CQT, which asks direct questions (e.g., “Did you break into the jewelry store?”) and then compares the physiological reactions with a control question (e.g., “Have you ever taken something that did not belong to you?”), the CIT is an indirect questioning technique that determines if a suspect has knowledge of crime details. The primary aim of CIT is to detect knowledge about specific crime details rather than asking directly about participation in a crime (Lykken, 1959, 1974). Therefore, the CIT compares relevant items (also referred to as “key items”) such as features of the crime that only the perpetrator could know,
Arguably, there are many reasons for punishment, including: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, restoration, and rehabilitation. The main aim of criminal law is to punish anybody who does wrong to the society; however, it is clear that there are different goals and forms of punishment as listen above. Notably, these differences exist because of the severity of the crime and its punishment. A murderer can be sentenced to die but a shoplifter cannot face the same sentence. The first type of punishment, retribution, punishes the crime doer because the system believes that it is right and fair. Therefore, it looks back at the crime and matches it with the best possible punishment (Schmalleger, 2013). The second type, incapacitation, is forward
According to Hutchison (2015), “Cognition can be defined as our conscious or preconscious thinking processes-the mental activities of which we are
The Goals of Punishment For many generations there has been an old saying that “if you do the crime then do the time” and still applies in this current epidemic. In fact, which goes to show that there are some in society that may need to be punished for their wrong doings. Parents use the same exact metaphor when disciplining their children when they do something wrong. No one is perfect and as humans there will be times when mistakes will be made. Life is all about living and learning from past mistakes and moving on to know what not to do.
Guilt in Crime and Punishment In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky tells the story of a young man who has been forced out of his studies at a university, by poverty. In these circumstances, he develops his theory of an extraordinary man (Frank 62). This conjecture is composed of the idea that all great men must climb over obstacles in their way to reach their highest potential and benefit humankind. In Raskolnikov's life, the great obstacle is his lack of money, and the way to get over this obstacle is to kill a pawnbroker that he knows.
Mental health is defined as "A state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease" (World health organization [WHO], 2012, p.3). Mental illness refers to health conditions or disorders which are characterized by alterations in thinking, mood, and behaviors, and may affect a person’s ability to fully function on a daily basic (Healthy people 2020).
In this stage, cultural or values of the family members give children an important impact for their growth. Children are actively in different kind of physical activities, their muscle movement and perception is getting stable, they know how to use language and create creativity. They like to copy others as well as feel curious about all the things around them and started to ask lots of questions. In this stable stage, children started know how to use their physical ability to do many things such as hit their friends or scold people. Children will aways ask: Is it okay for me to do what i do? If they encouraged to do, and adult give them lots of chances to engage activity with freedom they will feel happy and initiative to explore the environment around them. In the meantimes, their language ability will improve speedy, they use language to get new information and the initiative stimulate children's sense of communication or
Mental health is defined as a state of well-being in which each person is able to comprehend his or her own potential, manage the normal stresses of life, work effectively, and have an involvement in the community. A mentally healthy human being is in touch with reality, can identify with other people and adapt well to situations in their environment, and can solve conflicts. Mentally healthy folks have psychobiological elasticity. Mental illnesses usually have definable diagnoses. The person who experiences a psychiatric or mental illness has lost the skill to act in response to their surroundings in ways that are in agreement with self or with the expectations of the world. Mental illness is categorized by thoughts and behaviors that
In all Australian legal jurisdictions, children under the age of ten are considered to be too young to have criminal intent. That means, that children under this age cannot be held legally responsible for their actions. Australia is the only region in the world to have uniform legal guidelines on the lower age limit of criminal responsibility. (Weijers, Grisso 2009 p.45). Having the presumption that children under the age of ten are unable to know the law completely, therefore not being able to have mens rea, is in my opinion, necessary in our criminal courts. This essay will look at the reasons for the necessary use of the minimum age of criminal responsibility, such as the Beijing rules, the convention
a natural periodic state of rest for the mind and body, in which the eyes usually close and consciousness is completely or partially lost, so that there is a decrease in bodily movement and responsiveness to external stimuli. During sleep the brain in humans and other mammals undergoes a characteristic cycle of brain-wave activity that includes intervals of dreaming (The Free Dictionary by Farlax, 2002).
Mental health is much more complex than only the absence of a mental illness. There are various definitions of what constitutes mental health. Mental health can be defined as a state in which an individual is able to adjust in the circumstances that they find themselves with the recurrent stresses of everyday living in an acceptable way (Williams. L & Wi...
Consciousness, in psychology, is a term commonly used to indicate a state of awareness of ones self and environment. In Freudian psychology, conscious behaviour largely includes cognitive processes of the ego, such as thinking, perception, and planning, as well as some aspects of the superego, such as moral conscience. Some psychologists deny the distinction between conscious and unconscious behaviour; others use the term consciousness to indicate all the activities of an individual that constitute the personality. Consciousness has been defined in a number of ways, according to Thomas Nagel (1974) consciousness is ‘what it is like to be something.’ Without it, it would be like nothing exists. The term means many different things to many different
Individual responsibility provides a just and effective base that current Australian legal system. This following essay will analyse how the criminal justice system rests upon the idea of individualised responsibility with reference to the main two core principles that make person criminal liable, these being the Latin phrases Mens Rea “guilty mind and atus reas “Guilty act”. These two core principles will then be used to critically analyse the current model of individual responsibility to support that it is an effective and fair system for Australian criminal law. Finally this essay will conclude by outlining another alternative to the current model of individualised responsibility, which theory of scientific critique.
Conscious Mind – Conscious mind is the objective or the thinking mind. It has no memory, and it can only hold one thought at a time. Your conscious mind functions very much like a binary computer, performing two functions: It accepts or rejects data in making choices and