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Originally Posted by KSigkid
Again, I'm not a criminal law expert, so take what I say with a grain of salt...but my understanding is that in the United States, temporary insanity can't be offered as an affirmative defense. It can only be offered as a mitigating factor to take into account when handing down a sentence.
It may be a different story in Canada.
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We don't call it "temporary insanity." That's a lay term which looks a lot like a legal defense, but it doesn't exist. A plea of not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect goes right to the
mens rea aspect of the crime (a crime consists of two things, an act (
actus reus) and a 'bad' mental state of either intentionally, knowingly, recklessly or negligently doing the bad thing (
mens rea).
Most U.S. jurisdictions have rules which go something like this (cut/pasted from wikipedia):
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. . . [A] person may be "insane" if "...at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, arising from a 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."
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According to that same article, the defense is very rare -- used only in less than 1% of the murder cases and successful only about 26% of the time.
Also, your 'reward,' should this defense work is to be locked in psyciatric prison facility until you are rehabilitated or until you are dead. My guess is that more often than not, it is the later that comes true more often than the former.
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