percentage rate of successful of instanity defense

In terms of preventing repeat offenses, psychiatric treatment seems to help. NGRI defendants tend to spend more time in institutions than patients with similar diagnoses who were not accused of a crime, which undercuts somewhat the argument that treatment, not punishment, is the goal. Treatment varies from state to state in both duration and, some say, quality some defendants spend more time in mental institutions than they would have spent in jail had they been convicted, some less. The quality of post-NGRI psychiatric treatment may be another problem. So the quality of expert witnesses may vary from state to state. According to one national survey, only about 60 percent of states required an expert witness in NGRI determinations be a psychiatrist or psychologist less than 20 percent required additional certification of some sort and only 12 percent required a test. Regulation concerning who can testify as to the sanity of a defendant is very inconsistent from state to state. Some problems, however, have emerged with NGRI. High-profile NGRI cases involving rich defendants with teams of experts may grab headlines and inflame the debate, but they are very rare. In most of the rest, the state didn't contest the NGRI claim, the defendant was declared incompetent to stand trial, or charges were dropped. In some studies, as many as 70 percent of NGRI defendants withdrew their plea when a state-appointed expert found them to be legally sane. Interestingly, states with higher rates of NGRI defenses tend to have lower success rates for NGRI defenses the percentage of all defendants found NGRI is fairly constant, at around 0.26 percent. While rates vary from state to state, on average less than one defendant in 100-0.85 percent- actually raises the insanity defense nationwide. Some states allow an NGRI defense either when defendants lack awareness that what they did was wrong (called mens rea, or literally 'guilty mind') or lack the ability to resist committing the crime ( actus rea, 'guilty act'), while other states only recognize mens rea defenses. One problem with discussing NGRI is that there are, strictly speaking, 51 types of insanity defense in the United States-one for each set of state laws, and one for federal law. Research on NGRI fails to support most of these claims but some serious problems may exist with NGRI. Critics of NGRI have claimed that too many sane defendants use NGRI to escape justice that the state of psychological knowledge encourages expensive 'dueling expert' contests that juries are unlikely to understand and that, in practice, the defense unfairly excludes some defendants. It is important to note that 'insanity' is a legal term, not a psychological one, and experts disagree whether it has valid psychological meaning. The 'not guilty by reason of insanity' (NGRI) verdict rests in part on two assumptions: that some mentally ill people cannot be deterred by the threat of punishment, and that treatment for the defendant is more likely to protect society than a jail term without treatment. The idea that some people with mental illness should not be held responsible for crimes they commit dates back to the Roman Empire, if not earlier.

Often, the sentence will substitute psychiatric treatment in place of jail time. The insanity defense allows a mentally ill person to avoid being imprisoned for a crime on the assumption that he or she was not capable of distinguishing right from wrong.

Percentage rate of successful of instanity defense