How depressing that this kind of argument still has to be made, or rather, that it has to be remade because so many people seem to never have had this explained to them before.
I feel similarly about when juveniles are "tried as an adult" due to the severity of the crime. Separate standards for minors and adults arise from their differing levels of capacity and should be completely unaffected by the nature of the crime.
Separate standards for juveniles are only in part based on a difference in capacity; they are mostly based on the likelihood that the juvenile will benefit from the type of rehabilitative treatment juvenile courts can provide.
The 14 year old who shoplifts, or steals a car, or breaks into a closed business - these are all children who can benefit from treatment programs and will, in many cases, go on to not commit more crimes. (Although none of these treatment programs work all the time; many don't work most of the time, but they usually work better than nothing at all).
There just isn't any treatment program that will help a 17 year old who commits a crime like murder (or any violent crime, really). And in most places in the US, the juvenile court system loses jurisdiction over the child when they turn 21, so at that point the 17 year old tried as a juvenile would just be released.
An adult court sentence would take the 17 year old's capacity into consideration - but given how long murder sentences are in the US, it's probably the difference between a 30 year sentence and a 45 year sentence.
And one goal of any criminal justice system is incapacitation - that is, preventing the criminal from committing new crimes.
It's, obviously, not a perfect system. But we don't really have the ability to make a perfect system.
But surely determination of guilt/innocence is the purpose of a trial? Sentencing is separate from establishing responsibility. If a person is too unwell, insane or young to be held to normal adult standards of responsibility, *both* the trial AND the sentencing should take that into account. Sentencing is the place where danger to the public, likelihood of reoffending, and mitigating circumstances can be taken into account, but this is downstream of the process of establishing guilt or innocence. There are circumstances where someone is too impaired to be found criminally responsible AND too dangerous to self or others to be released - in many places there are contingencies such as psychiatric commitment to handle such cases. Similar procedures could be put in place to handle juveniles that require special treatment. In neither case should post verdict treatment or punishment options change the way responsibility is allocated at trial.
I fully admit that in many (most?) places neither psychiatric nor youth services are necessarily adequate or appropriate, but again, these are separates issue from criminal culpability.
"If a person is too unwell, insane or young to be held to normal adult standards of responsibility, *both* the trial AND the sentencing should take that into account."
I'm not exactly sure how to unpack "normal adult standards of responsibility" in the context of the guilt phase of a trial.
Because even a 13 year old charged as a juvenile for, say, shoplifting, is subject to the same standards as an adult in terms of determining whether they actually did the shoplifting or not. If there isn't enough evidence, they will be found not guilty (or there will be no "true finding", to use the juvenile terminology). But it won't be based on their age.
If there is a finding of guilt, we've just decided as a society that the consequences of this delinquent act that would be a crime if committed by an adult will be different.
"Similar procedures could be put in place to handle juveniles that require special treatment."
Sure. Although I'm not sure that thewe don't already exist.
I don’t think a lot of people who disagree with the insanity plea not guilty option doubt whether that person can truly be insane (because of the heinous nature of their crime). It’s more that a crime of a certain heinous nature by definition implies a level of removal from societal norms sufficient to label a degree of “insanity”. Whether arbitrary psychiatric studies say a person is insane or not, they are still a tremendous danger to society.
In practice, these edge cases typically still entail life incarceration one or another for the defendant. But I think a lot of people hear not guilty and think that the person is sort of put back into society. Just my two cents
I don't exactly disagree with you, but I think you need to take a certain amount of societal exhaustion into account here. Seattle is my hometown and I still live nearby, and the progressives who have taken it over have chosen to tolerate huge levels of public disorder in the name of social justice that has rendered large parts of the city dangerous and unpleasant. Further, they've created a de facto two tier justice system that practices catch and release with repeat violent criminals but comes down hard on more politically disfavored groups. Given that background, I can *understand* the idea of someone suffering a psychotic episode not being fully in control of their actions and thus having a diminished responsibility, but I still want him taken behind the courthouse and shot, along with the guy who recently blinded an elderly woman he hit in the face with a nail studded board. The cops said of that guy "normally he just punches", as if that makes it okay.
I don't think you're wrong that severity of a crime has nothing to do with whether or not someone's insane.
But distinctions such as ‘mad versus bad’ matter only insofar as they improve our ability to predict behavior and manage risk, meaning psychiatric treatment would have to reduce the likelihood of reoffending *more effectively* than traditional punishment, rather than because they determine what someone "deserves". Once the conversation shifts to “deserves,” it tends to spiral into abstract debates that don’t move the actual problem forward.
I also think that people often have a problem with this because they assume criminals are more likely to be released to reoffend if they're deemed insane. Whether or not that is true I do not know. There's also an aversion to the idea of helping violent criminals in any way. A class of loud karens with homicidal vanity has long bitched about how criminals are the real victims and "we" should be nicer to them. While at the same time we keep seeing cases of repeat offenders with long records hurting people again, so it’s not surprising that anything resembling lighter treatment triggers a negative reaction. After all, "why should I want my tax going to trying to help a crazy murderer?" is far from unreasonable.
Pluckrose's one-sided piece fails to take into account:
1. Consciousness of guilt - Goosby fled the scene and ditched the gun. This potentially shows he knew the act was wrong, undermining the “unable to distinguish right from wrong” prong of the defence.
2. There is some history showing that some of his psychosis at previous times was potentially induced by his hard drug use, rather than mental illness.
3. Criminal history of hard drug use, despite awareness that it can induce psychosis. This is not innocent behaviour.
4. The "But, but, but he must like totally be spared jail because like mental health and stuff" is not a universal point of view, especially when there are aggravating factors.
She wasn't arguing Goosby was definitely insane and shouldn't be held accountable, she was using his case as an example of the discourse before making a broader point about sanity and criminal responsibility.
In the piece, Pluckrose defended the not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) verdict, arguing that public outrage demanding punishment in such cases stems from flawed, emotionally driven thinking rather than sound ethics or logic.
Pluckrose, like so many intellectuals, over-intellectualised the issue, dismissive of the public who smelt a rat.
It's an assumption that the public would support keeping such individuals alive indefinitely at substantial cost. In a state of severe addiction, serious mental illness, and after committing such acts, is prolonged survival necessarily in the individual’s own interest? If we could choose the consequences for our later selves if we ever descended into that situation, many of us would choose lethal injection over staying alive.
The argument is right there, Tony. I gave the very examples you gave of valid objections and said they were valid.
You now raise two new issues:
1) Is it better for people who could always be potentially dangerous to be euthanised rather than a burden on the taxpayer and is that actually kinder? That’s a very utilitarian argument and it applies to the people I cared for too in secure units because they had profound intellectual disability. I’d say no and that we have a responsibility to both protect the public from them and try to give them some quality of life.
2) Should people with profound mental illness be able to opt for euthanasia because their own quality of life was so poor and because they feared harming someone. I’d say yes, for the same reasons I generally support assisted dying, provided really rigorous evaluation was done and it was established that the individual was of sound mind when they made this decision.
What about intoxication? Do you think people should be any more or less culpable for crimes they commit while drunk or high?
In my opinion, justice demands that intoxicants be treated as aggravating factors (if anything at all) in sentencing—but I also don't rlly have a "liberal brain", so, opinions may differ
I think that has a similar type of criminal responsibility to somebody not taking antipsychotic medication or reporting symptoms they recognise to mental health professionals even though they knew it could make them dangerous.
Somebody who drives a car into a crowd of people because they are drunk is different to somebody who does so because of a commitment to a terrorist ideology and they are both different to somebody who does so because they suddenly see a demon sitting on their backseat and react in terror or someone who has an unexpected heart attack and loses consciousness. We often have to take such things on a case-by-case basis and this is not a liberal position, but a consideration of issues of personal responsibility and public safety.
I don't think moral punishment is a legitimate goal of the justice system. If it were, then torture would be in order, and it's not. The primary purpose of incarceration is to separate dangerous people from society. Not all insane people are dangerous, but those who commit murder are even more dangerous than sane people. And they should be incarcerated all the more for their insanity.
We can argue for appropriate facilities. But an insane murderer should be removed from society for at least as long as a sane one. Sanity or lack of it should have no bearing on sentencing.
The responses you quote also seem to equate justice with vengeance. The idea of "justice for the victims" encourages and encapsulates this dumbing down of the principle of justice as accountability to society, not only to those one has wronged. That limited scope of justice is more appropriate to tribal and clan societies than to our complex society.
Idealistic? Well, somewhat, of course. More practically, I would argue that public comment by those in the justice system and in government should stay away from validating or supporting the idea of "justice for the victim".
How depressing that this kind of argument still has to be made, or rather, that it has to be remade because so many people seem to never have had this explained to them before.
I feel similarly about when juveniles are "tried as an adult" due to the severity of the crime. Separate standards for minors and adults arise from their differing levels of capacity and should be completely unaffected by the nature of the crime.
Yes! I initially had a section on that but cut it to keep the argument streamlined.
No, it's more complicated than that.
Separate standards for juveniles are only in part based on a difference in capacity; they are mostly based on the likelihood that the juvenile will benefit from the type of rehabilitative treatment juvenile courts can provide.
The 14 year old who shoplifts, or steals a car, or breaks into a closed business - these are all children who can benefit from treatment programs and will, in many cases, go on to not commit more crimes. (Although none of these treatment programs work all the time; many don't work most of the time, but they usually work better than nothing at all).
There just isn't any treatment program that will help a 17 year old who commits a crime like murder (or any violent crime, really). And in most places in the US, the juvenile court system loses jurisdiction over the child when they turn 21, so at that point the 17 year old tried as a juvenile would just be released.
An adult court sentence would take the 17 year old's capacity into consideration - but given how long murder sentences are in the US, it's probably the difference between a 30 year sentence and a 45 year sentence.
And one goal of any criminal justice system is incapacitation - that is, preventing the criminal from committing new crimes.
It's, obviously, not a perfect system. But we don't really have the ability to make a perfect system.
But surely determination of guilt/innocence is the purpose of a trial? Sentencing is separate from establishing responsibility. If a person is too unwell, insane or young to be held to normal adult standards of responsibility, *both* the trial AND the sentencing should take that into account. Sentencing is the place where danger to the public, likelihood of reoffending, and mitigating circumstances can be taken into account, but this is downstream of the process of establishing guilt or innocence. There are circumstances where someone is too impaired to be found criminally responsible AND too dangerous to self or others to be released - in many places there are contingencies such as psychiatric commitment to handle such cases. Similar procedures could be put in place to handle juveniles that require special treatment. In neither case should post verdict treatment or punishment options change the way responsibility is allocated at trial.
I fully admit that in many (most?) places neither psychiatric nor youth services are necessarily adequate or appropriate, but again, these are separates issue from criminal culpability.
"If a person is too unwell, insane or young to be held to normal adult standards of responsibility, *both* the trial AND the sentencing should take that into account."
I'm not exactly sure how to unpack "normal adult standards of responsibility" in the context of the guilt phase of a trial.
Because even a 13 year old charged as a juvenile for, say, shoplifting, is subject to the same standards as an adult in terms of determining whether they actually did the shoplifting or not. If there isn't enough evidence, they will be found not guilty (or there will be no "true finding", to use the juvenile terminology). But it won't be based on their age.
If there is a finding of guilt, we've just decided as a society that the consequences of this delinquent act that would be a crime if committed by an adult will be different.
"Similar procedures could be put in place to handle juveniles that require special treatment."
Sure. Although I'm not sure that thewe don't already exist.
I don’t think a lot of people who disagree with the insanity plea not guilty option doubt whether that person can truly be insane (because of the heinous nature of their crime). It’s more that a crime of a certain heinous nature by definition implies a level of removal from societal norms sufficient to label a degree of “insanity”. Whether arbitrary psychiatric studies say a person is insane or not, they are still a tremendous danger to society.
In practice, these edge cases typically still entail life incarceration one or another for the defendant. But I think a lot of people hear not guilty and think that the person is sort of put back into society. Just my two cents
I don't exactly disagree with you, but I think you need to take a certain amount of societal exhaustion into account here. Seattle is my hometown and I still live nearby, and the progressives who have taken it over have chosen to tolerate huge levels of public disorder in the name of social justice that has rendered large parts of the city dangerous and unpleasant. Further, they've created a de facto two tier justice system that practices catch and release with repeat violent criminals but comes down hard on more politically disfavored groups. Given that background, I can *understand* the idea of someone suffering a psychotic episode not being fully in control of their actions and thus having a diminished responsibility, but I still want him taken behind the courthouse and shot, along with the guy who recently blinded an elderly woman he hit in the face with a nail studded board. The cops said of that guy "normally he just punches", as if that makes it okay.
I don't think you're wrong that severity of a crime has nothing to do with whether or not someone's insane.
But distinctions such as ‘mad versus bad’ matter only insofar as they improve our ability to predict behavior and manage risk, meaning psychiatric treatment would have to reduce the likelihood of reoffending *more effectively* than traditional punishment, rather than because they determine what someone "deserves". Once the conversation shifts to “deserves,” it tends to spiral into abstract debates that don’t move the actual problem forward.
I also think that people often have a problem with this because they assume criminals are more likely to be released to reoffend if they're deemed insane. Whether or not that is true I do not know. There's also an aversion to the idea of helping violent criminals in any way. A class of loud karens with homicidal vanity has long bitched about how criminals are the real victims and "we" should be nicer to them. While at the same time we keep seeing cases of repeat offenders with long records hurting people again, so it’s not surprising that anything resembling lighter treatment triggers a negative reaction. After all, "why should I want my tax going to trying to help a crazy murderer?" is far from unreasonable.
Pluckrose's one-sided piece fails to take into account:
1. Consciousness of guilt - Goosby fled the scene and ditched the gun. This potentially shows he knew the act was wrong, undermining the “unable to distinguish right from wrong” prong of the defence.
2. There is some history showing that some of his psychosis at previous times was potentially induced by his hard drug use, rather than mental illness.
3. Criminal history of hard drug use, despite awareness that it can induce psychosis. This is not innocent behaviour.
4. The "But, but, but he must like totally be spared jail because like mental health and stuff" is not a universal point of view, especially when there are aggravating factors.
A hard unsubscribe from me.
She wasn't arguing Goosby was definitely insane and shouldn't be held accountable, she was using his case as an example of the discourse before making a broader point about sanity and criminal responsibility.
In the piece, Pluckrose defended the not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) verdict, arguing that public outrage demanding punishment in such cases stems from flawed, emotionally driven thinking rather than sound ethics or logic.
Pluckrose, like so many intellectuals, over-intellectualised the issue, dismissive of the public who smelt a rat.
It's an assumption that the public would support keeping such individuals alive indefinitely at substantial cost. In a state of severe addiction, serious mental illness, and after committing such acts, is prolonged survival necessarily in the individual’s own interest? If we could choose the consequences for our later selves if we ever descended into that situation, many of us would choose lethal injection over staying alive.
The argument is right there, Tony. I gave the very examples you gave of valid objections and said they were valid.
You now raise two new issues:
1) Is it better for people who could always be potentially dangerous to be euthanised rather than a burden on the taxpayer and is that actually kinder? That’s a very utilitarian argument and it applies to the people I cared for too in secure units because they had profound intellectual disability. I’d say no and that we have a responsibility to both protect the public from them and try to give them some quality of life.
2) Should people with profound mental illness be able to opt for euthanasia because their own quality of life was so poor and because they feared harming someone. I’d say yes, for the same reasons I generally support assisted dying, provided really rigorous evaluation was done and it was established that the individual was of sound mind when they made this decision.
I wonder what would change about this conversation if our justice system was oriented toward repair rather than punishment
What about intoxication? Do you think people should be any more or less culpable for crimes they commit while drunk or high?
In my opinion, justice demands that intoxicants be treated as aggravating factors (if anything at all) in sentencing—but I also don't rlly have a "liberal brain", so, opinions may differ
I think that has a similar type of criminal responsibility to somebody not taking antipsychotic medication or reporting symptoms they recognise to mental health professionals even though they knew it could make them dangerous.
Somebody who drives a car into a crowd of people because they are drunk is different to somebody who does so because of a commitment to a terrorist ideology and they are both different to somebody who does so because they suddenly see a demon sitting on their backseat and react in terror or someone who has an unexpected heart attack and loses consciousness. We often have to take such things on a case-by-case basis and this is not a liberal position, but a consideration of issues of personal responsibility and public safety.
There's a related culpability issues: you are (generally) not responsible for your actions while sleepwalking.
https://www.cwsdefense.com/blog/2024/september/understanding-the-sleepwalking-defense/
Here's a question:- to what extent can I evidence that 'I' am writing this sentence, and in doing so am exercising 'intent'?
I don’t know.
I don't think moral punishment is a legitimate goal of the justice system. If it were, then torture would be in order, and it's not. The primary purpose of incarceration is to separate dangerous people from society. Not all insane people are dangerous, but those who commit murder are even more dangerous than sane people. And they should be incarcerated all the more for their insanity.
We can argue for appropriate facilities. But an insane murderer should be removed from society for at least as long as a sane one. Sanity or lack of it should have no bearing on sentencing.
The responses you quote also seem to equate justice with vengeance. The idea of "justice for the victims" encourages and encapsulates this dumbing down of the principle of justice as accountability to society, not only to those one has wronged. That limited scope of justice is more appropriate to tribal and clan societies than to our complex society.
Idealistic? Well, somewhat, of course. More practically, I would argue that public comment by those in the justice system and in government should stay away from validating or supporting the idea of "justice for the victim".