criminal law
Introduction
With this informative paper I will be discussing the issues that are related to the civil commitment of the mentally ill criminals in the state of South Carolina. I will also try and provide summaries of the statutes that are used in South Carolina, how often they are used, the success rate and what the critics think about this law.
In today’s Justice System, more often than not criminals that get caught think the first thing and that is to plead insanity. Most offenders are repeat offenders. With the repeat offenders they seem to know the law and yet they still decide to break it and are amazed when they get caught. For the insanity plea it is normally used by the defendant, what this means is that the defendant is using the pleas of insanity for a lesser sentence, meaning they don’t understand right from wrong. I will go into more detail in my paper about the insanity in my state.
The first thing I want to do is define what insanity is. According to our book Wrightman’s Psychology and the Legal System, 8th Edition it defines insanity as “To establish a defense on the grounds of insanity it must be clearly proved that, at the time of committing the act, the accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or, if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong.” (Greene, E., & Heilbrun, K. (2013), now here in South Carolina, this state goes by the M’Naghten rule, this rules expresses insanity as not knowing the difference between what is right and what is wrong. With that being said I will identify the difficulties for apprehending and treating the mentally ill in South Carolina. According to the Greenville online website, a national report ranks this state near the bottom when it comes to treating the mentally ill inmates. This means that we are at the bottom of the availability of psychiatric beds, with efforts to deter mentally ill
With this informative paper I will be discussing the issues that are related to the civil commitment of the mentally ill criminals in the state of South Carolina. I will also try and provide summaries of the statutes that are used in South Carolina, how often they are used, the success rate and what the critics think about this law.
In today’s Justice System, more often than not criminals that get caught think the first thing and that is to plead insanity. Most offenders are repeat offenders. With the repeat offenders they seem to know the law and yet they still decide to break it and are amazed when they get caught. For the insanity plea it is normally used by the defendant, what this means is that the defendant is using the pleas of insanity for a lesser sentence, meaning they don’t understand right from wrong. I will go into more detail in my paper about the insanity in my state.
The first thing I want to do is define what insanity is. According to our book Wrightman’s Psychology and the Legal System, 8th Edition it defines insanity as “To establish a defense on the grounds of insanity it must be clearly proved that, at the time of committing the act, the accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or, if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong.” (Greene, E., & Heilbrun, K. (2013), now here in South Carolina, this state goes by the M’Naghten rule, this rules expresses insanity as not knowing the difference between what is right and what is wrong. With that being said I will identify the difficulties for apprehending and treating the mentally ill in South Carolina. According to the Greenville online website, a national report ranks this state near the bottom when it comes to treating the mentally ill inmates. This means that we are at the bottom of the availability of psychiatric beds, with efforts to deter mentally ill
References: Smith, T. (2014, April 10). Greenvilleonline.com. Retrieved from SC ranks "near the bottom" in treatment of mentally ill inmates: http://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/politics http://www.lawserver.com/law/state/south-carolina/sc-code/south_carolina_code_17-24-70 Greene, E., & Heilbrun, K. (2013). Wrightsman 's Psychology and the Legal System, 8th Edition. [VitalSource Bookshelf version].