INTRODUCTION In Belgium, offenders who are deemed criminally irresponsible for their criminal actions because of mental illness or intellectual disability are subject to a specific safety measure with the dual objective of protecting society and providing mandated care to the offender. While Belgian law requires that offenders who are deemed criminally irresponsible should be in a hospital, cli...

OBJECTIVE The authors studied all defendants in Baltimore City's circuit and district courts who pleaded not criminally responsible, Maryland's version of the not guilty by reason of insanity plea, during a 1-year period. The study was designed to compare the perception that the insanity plea is misused to actual outcome data. METHOD The cohort of defendants who pleaded not criminally respons...

This contribution questions the positive/negative eugenics dichotomy that typifies the historiography on the eugenic movement in the Netherlands and the claim that this movement was mostly marginal because only positive eugenics was pursued. From 1938 to 1968 in the Netherlands, after a decade of debates, 400 sex offenders who had been committed to asylums for the criminally insane were 'volunt...

between himself and an insane woman, he comes close to a satisfactory definition of insanity when he says to her, "You, of course, are insane, for this reason, the law provides that only insane persons shall be confined in asylums for the insane, while the sane are rigidly excluded. Now, as between you and me, you are legally confined in this asylum, and I am legally excluded; therefore, when y...

THE LAW of 30 June 1838 which created lunatic asylums in every department in France fixed the legal and institutional framework within which the insane were to be treated for the remainder of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries.' The law was a victory for the campaign of public opinion and pressure on government which interested parties, especially in the medical profession, ha...

as a rule, like other criminal legal systems, insane people are exempted from criminal liability in iranian criminal law. the previous penal code, replaced in 1982, had classified the mentally ill people into two groups. those completely insane were totally free from criminal liability and those suffering from less serious mental illnesses benefit to some extent liable to a certain lenient degr...

Although the law generally does not permit an individual to profit by his own wrongdoing, that equitable principle may be inapplicable in the case of an individual who has been adjudicated insane (and therefore has not committed a wrong in the eyes of the law). This paper discusses three unusual legacies of a determination of insanity: the inheritance cases (permitting the insane killer to inhe...