Two alternatives to the use of the insanity defense in the American justice system that have gained political popularity include its abolishment and the addition of a guilty but mentally ill verdict. The abolishment of the insanity defense would propose that everyone should be held accountable for his or her criminal actions, regardless of the presence of mental illness. This position however, is in direct contrast to a basic principle of our criminal justice system, that criminal intent must be established for a defendant to be convicted of a criminal act.

In the seventeenth-century, legal commentators Edward Coke and Matthew Hale both recognized the difficulty of defining the range of insanity. Coke pointed out that there were not only idiots and the chronically insane, but episodic lunatics, who were sometimes mad but who, during "lucid intervals," must be held accountable for their crimes. Hale also added those suffering from "partial insanity," where the lunatic had an intact "use of reason" on most subjects. By the late seventeenth century, the insanity defense was firmly in place. The insanity defense was no longer just an exemption from the law based on sympathy and assessment of the prisoner's mental state. It was part of the law; as Matthew Hale put it "a system of criminal law that required a guilty mind for conviction must necessarily acquit those who were out of their minds, who were inadvertently led into crime by the most innocent of intentions."#

A great display of outrage from the American public towards the Hinckley acquittal brought forth swift emotional demands for changes in the current insanity defense laws. In the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, Congress shifted the burden from the prosecution (government), to the defense to affirmatively prove the existence of the insanity defense by a standard of "clear and convincing"# evidence, and Congress also restricted the use of the insanity defense in federal court. This reform somewhat helped to ease the mind of the American public.

In this paper I will discuss the history of the insanity defense and the controversy that now surrounds the issue in today's society. I will start by giving an historical perspective on the formation of the insanity defense, followed by the landmark trial of Daniel McNaughton, which established the guidelines that would set the standard for nearly a century to come in determining the sanity of the defendant. Lastly, I will discuss the current controversy in American society over the use of the insanity plea in the American criminal justice system.

This first test that the McNaughton trial provided was a grand step in determining weather a defendant to be insane or not. It was the first form of specific guidelines to be followed and the first standard that was set in order to judge someone on the grounds of the insanity defense.

In response to the prosecution, the defense countered with a quotation from Roscoe's Criminal Evidence indicating that the issue could be much more subtle than a simple question of intellectual awareness of right and wrong, "Although a prisoner understands perfectly the distinction between right and wrong, yet if he labors, as is generally the case, and is thereby incapable of applying it correctly to his own conduct, he is in that state of mental aberration which renders him not criminally answerable for his actions.........."#

This statement applied to McNaughton seemed to be true, since though he was intelligent in some ways, there was strong evidence that he had suffered from paranoid delusions for many years. McNaughton told the journeyman who bought his business that spies prevented him from obtaining work.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2563
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)