Bad Santa. No, I mean REALLY Bad.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by classicman

If you intentionally kill someone because you were on drugs or whatever, I do not think that should be a viable excuse. If you commit premeditated murder - no excuses.

Drugs (or alcohol) are a choice. Crazy, and by that I mean real, genuine crazy, isn't.

Everybody gets really hot over the "insanity defense," when it's actually used quite rarely, and even then rarely succeeds.

Apparently it's only used in 0.85% of criminal defenses nationwide, and only succeeds 0.26%.

Consider also, that most of those cases are not capital crimes ... One of our psychiatrists does criminal competency evaluations. Every now and again there's an "exciting" case involved, but mostly she's seeing people charged with destruction of property, criminal trespass, maybe rarely terroristic threats or assault.