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“According to an eight-state study, the insanity defense is used in less than 1% of all court cases and, when used, has only a 26% success rate. Of those cases
by TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
“According to an eight-state study, the insanity defense is used in less than 1% of all court cases and, when used, has only a 26% success rate. Of those cases that were successful, 90% of the defendants had been previously diagnosed with mental illness.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insanity_defense https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insanity_defense
- tus666 5y agoMental illness is still widely used as a mitigating factor in sentencing, even if insanity is not plead.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoMental illness has a much longer history of being (pointlessly) punished as 'evil'. A current one is the recognition that many people in prison may have untreated ADHD, which makes sense, just like a bunch of folk got kicked out of school for dyslexia in recent history (and then became successful artists or business leaders). You could argue, people are now just faking dyslexia to get a pass on having to work hard at school, but if you can't demonstrate that to be a bigger problem than the genuine dyslexics being discarded as useless due to assumptions being made that they were stupid or troublemakers because of their condition, then it's a price well worth paying.