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| Is Mental Illness an Excuse? Posted by Michael E. Marotta on 8/10, 4:07am | ||
| We do not punish the mentally ill because the law is based on Christian -- and perhaps Objectivist -- principles of free will. The mentally ill bear no responsibililty for their actions because they lack the capacity of judgment. They are not rational creatures. They are "treated" not "punished." Is that justice? The ancient Greeks did not accept the theory that drunkeness excused a man from the consequences of his actions. They fully accepted that a man who is drunk is "out of his mind" and "does not know what he is doing." That was irrelevant. Yet, capital crimes cannot bring capital punishment. In a benign society, we believe that the police catch the perpetrator, the prosecutor examines the evidence, the grand jury finds cause, the petit jury hears the facts, the judge passes sentence. DNA testing shows that it is not that simple. A mentally ill -- or mentally retarded -- person is likely to admit to all kinds of actions. Consider this from another angle. Seemingly ordinary people complain to prosecutors and attorneys general that they were "bilked" by "high pressure" salespeople from "boiler rooms." Unless you have been arrested and interrogated by teams of police, you have no idea what high pressure is like. Your court-appointed lawyer will tell you that pleading guilty to something you did not do ("a lesser charge") is the best deal you are going to get. Would you be the Objectivist Hero who resists? Perhaps so. And if so, then, your being just an ordinary person with a few well-thought-out principles, how do we evaluate people who confess to crimes they did not commit? How are they different from the "mentally incompetent"? In other words, considering that he killed an innocent person, is it objective justice to put Charles McCoy, Jr.out of his paranoid schizophrenic misery? | ||
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