American Law Institute's insanity defense standard
The American Law Institute's (ALI) insanity defense standard, formulated in the 1950s and early 1960s, is a significant legal framework used to assess an individual's culpability when a mental disease or defect is present. This standard emerged as a response to the limitations of earlier tests, such as the M'Naghten rule and the irresistible impulse rule, providing a more nuanced approach to legal insanity. According to the ALI standard, a person may not be held criminally responsible if, due to a mental condition, they lack substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality of their actions or to conform their conduct to legal requirements.
Importantly, the ALI standard incorporates both cognitive and volitional elements of mental impairment, thus offering a broader understanding of how mental health affects behavior. It has been widely adopted across federal courts and in numerous state jurisdictions, becoming a prominent framework in legal proceedings. However, the volitional aspect was later removed from the federal Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, which reflects ongoing evolution in legal interpretations of insanity. The ALI standard aims to balance the roles of mental health professionals and juries, addressing concerns that prior tests disproportionately favored expert testimony in determining a defendant's sanity.
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American Law Institute's insanity defense standard
DEFINITION: Statement of the insanity defense that has become widely accepted in federal and state jurisdictions throughout the United States.
SIGNIFICANCE: The American Law Institute’s carefully formulated insanity defense standard was created to overcome the shortcomings of earlier tests of insanity, such as the M’Naghten rule and the irresistible impulse rule.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, the American Law Institute (ALI) developed the Model Penal Code, the 1962 draft of which contained a statement of the insanity defense composed by a panel of judges, legal scholars, and behavioral scientists. It stated:
A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality (wrongfulness) of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law.…the terms “mental disease or defect” do not include an abnormality manifested only by repeated criminal or otherwise antisocial conduct.
In the 1972 case of United States v. Brawner, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia adopted the ALI rule, and it became the standard used in almost all federal courts and in twenty-two US state jurisdictions.
The ALI standard is considered a more precisely worded amalgam of two earlier insanity tests, namely, the M’Naghten rule and the irresistible impulse rule. The M’Naghten rule, developed in Great Britain in 1843, was the first formal test of legal insanity. As a test of legal insanity, it focused on whether the defendant’s insanity deprived the of a certain kind of cognitive ability, that of knowing what he or she was doing or knowing the difference between right and wrong. The ALI standard uses the broader term “appreciate” instead of “know” yet still retains the key idea of cognitive impairment.
Many jurisdictions had augmented the M’Naghten test with the irresistible impulse rule to allow for cases in which mental disease or defect impedes a person’s power to choose. The ALI standard replaces the somewhat narrow and misleading phrase “irresistible impulse” with the person’s not being able “to conform” his or her “conduct to the requirements of law,” thus capturing the underlying idea of volitional impairment. In the federal Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, the volitional impairment part of the ALI standard was eliminated as part of the definition of the insanity defense.
The ALI rule was also drawn in such a way as to avoid the looseness of two similar legal insanity tests, the New Hampshire rule and the Durham rule. Both tests framed the issue of legal insanity in terms of whether the criminal act was a product of mental disease. They were criticized on the grounds that in practice they resulted in “undue dominance of experts” in the courtroom, specifically, that the of forensic psychiatrists carried too much weight and encroached on the proper role of the jury.
Bibliography
"636. Insanity - Prior Law." U.S. Department of Justice, www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-636-insanity-prior-law. Accessed 13 Aug. 2024.
"Model Penal Code Insanity Defense." Cornell Law School, July 2023, www.law.cornell.edu/wex/model‗penal‗code‗insanity‗defense. Accessed 13 Aug. 2024.
Moore, Michael. Law and Psychiatry: Rethinking the Relationship. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Rogers, Richard, and Daniel W. Shuman. Fundamentals of Forensic Practice: Mental Health and Criminal Law. New York: Springer, 2005.