Post a response to this discussion thread
Your second question first, because your confusions multiply (or because you're deliberately trying to confuse the issue by lumping apples with monkey wrenches with chess pieces with sexual appliances -- my hasty compilation of things that do NOT go together):
(i) YOU deem prejudice and bigotry to be insanity. It is not so in law, and rightly so. By that reasoning, all crime is insane and irrational. You don't buy that, and neither do I. Legal insanity is the shprthand term for those mental conditions that diminish individual responsibility to the point that the law will not hold a given person responsible for his or her actions. Clinical insanity is something else again.
Please go back over that paragraph and read it four times.
(ii) The question of the hate crime is not a separate charge; it is rather a subcategory of the crime of homicide -- involuntary manslaughter, voluntary manslaughter, various degrees of murder, culminating with premeditated murder. In some proposals, it would be a separate charge at federal law as opposed to state law -- e.g., just as violating one's federal civil rights is a federal crime separate and distinct from a state charge of assault and battery (Rodney King beating) or homicide (Goodman-Cheney-Schwerner). Either way, at law the competence of the individual charged to stand trial is not put in issue by the presence of evidence leading to the hate crime.
(iii) You finally misperceive, yet again, the purpose of the insanity DEFENSE. It is a DEFENSE raised by the DEFENDANT against a charge brought by the prosecution. The defendant has the RIGHT to raise that defense and the RIGHT to put his or her own mental state in issue. BUT the defendant must take the risks along with the right, for being adjudicated legally insane carries with it the determination that the defendant is a danger to himself or herself and others and therefore must be subject to treatment and hospitalization unless and until he or she is shown to be cured of the condition giving rise to the determination of legal insanity exculpating the defendant from the crime with which he or she has been charged.
Please reread THAT paragraph four times.
Post a response to this discussion thread