The Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984: Much ado about nothing

✍ Scribed by Dr. Norman J. Finkel

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1989
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 891 KB
• Volume: 7
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0735-3936
• DOI: 10.1002/bsl.2370070309

✦ Synopsis

The Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984 (IDRA), passed in the wake of Hinckley (1981) and after two years of Senate and House testimony and debate, removed the b'volitiona"' prong of the ALJ test, leaving only the "cognitive" prong. Prior empirical research and speculation suggested that this corrective would not serve its intended purpose. In this experiment, 54 mock jurors received one of four insanity test instructions: IDRA, ALJ, a wild beastlmens rea test, or no instructions. Results showed that the test instructions did not produce significantb different verdict panerns, or effect in any other way the relevant and determinative constructs that jurors used in four different insanity cases.

. . . to conform his conduct to the requirements of law") was a much more difficult assessment and discrimination for jurors to make than the cognitive one (i.e., whether the defendant lacked "substantial capacity . . . to appreciate the criminality (wrongfulness) of his conduct"). As Rogers (1987, p. 841) noted,