Temporary Insanity

In case you missed it, Yates was found guilty. This is actually a surprise. Our legal system has this odd little thing called "Not guilty by reason of insanity". The intent is to prevent the system from inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on people who are incapable of realizing that what they did was wrong due to psychological impairment of some sort. I will agree that such people need some degree of understanding, but that is a different argument. This concept has led to something called "temporary insanity" which is used in any instance where there is no other plausible defense.

Caught your spouse and their lover in bed and whipped out a gun and killed them both? Temporary insanity. The person you love doesn't love you back, you show up at their door and blow them away? Temporary insanity. Your lover is going to leave you because they don't want to deal with the kids from your previous marraige, so you kill the kids*? Temporary insanity.

I cannot conceive of any situation other than self defense in which I could accept someone killing another person. I don't buy temporary insanity. It is used to defend the indefensible.

Beyond that, I am even more concerned with how we deal with people who are found "not guilty" by such a defense. What we are essentially saying is "We know that if the same sort of situation comes up again in your life you'll probably kill someone again, but that's OK." No, it's not OK. Someone who is capable of such a thing is a permanent threat to society. I don't have the answers to everything, and I realize that just throwing them in jail isn't necessarily going to help anything. Mental health care in this country is such a joke that it makes the rest of our health care system actually look good. House arrest? How will they earn a living. Monitoring? Great, you'll know where they are already when they kill someone else. I just don't know, all I know is what we have now is badly broken.

*This actually has happened.

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