Defenses to crime

SIGNIFICANCE: Many potential justifications and excuses are offered by criminal defendants for their illegal acts, and it is up to the courts to determine their validity.

To protect themselves from prosecution, persons accused of committing criminal acts can use a variety of defenses, which fall into two broad categories: denying all involvement in the acts and acknowledging involvement while denying responsibility. Actus reus is the actual commission of a criminal act. Defendants who deny actus reus are denying having committed the acts with which they are charged. In effect, they are simply asserting that their prosecutors are accusing the wrong people. Mens rea pertains to the mental elements behind commissions of crimes—what is known as criminal intent. Defendants who deny mens rea are acknowledging their commission of the acts in question but are also claiming either that their acts were justified or that their actions must be excused because of the circumstances surrounding them.

Justifications

Justifications involve situations in which accused persons admit to committing criminal acts but claim their acts were legally justified for any of various reasons. The accused persons are admitting to committing the acts. They understand fully that the acts are wrong and illegal but are submitting that they were legally justified in committing those acts because of circumstances.

Otherwise criminally punishable acts can be justified under numerous circumstances. The best known justification is self-defense. For defendants to make that claim successfully, they must prove that they had a reasonable belief that they were in imminent danger and used reasonable force to quell the danger. Justifiable self-defense can also include defending family members, friends, and the helpless. It does not apply to preemptive strikes against possible threats or acts of vengeance.

Most states adhere to a retreat doctrine that requires defendants claiming self-defense to show that they took all means to avoid or escape the dangerous situations before using force. However, this doctrine usually does not apply in situations in which persons are attacked within their own homes, from which they are not expected to retreat.

A second justification for criminal acts is performance of a public duty—committing criminal acts in order to acknowledge a higher loyalty, such as upholding the law. This concept supports issues of military justice and diplomatic immunity and covers police behavior, including shooting looters after natural disasters cause a breakdown in public order. The main idea regarding this defense is that upholding the law is a higher authority that may permit otherwise criminal behavior.

The justification of necessity involves committing one criminal act in order to avoid having to commit, or avoid, a greater wrong. Examples of situations in which the necessity of justification might apply include violating a speed limit to get a gravely ill person to a hospital, dispensing drugs without a prescription in a medical emergency, breaking and entering an empty structure to avoid freezing to death, and destroying property to prevent the spread of a fire. In most jurisdictions, economic necessity is not acceptable as a justification for stealing; however, the government’s power to pardon may be invoked in special cases.

The consent of victims is sometimes recognized as a justification by courts in cases in which it can be shown that the victims of criminal acts voluntarily consented to the offenders’ acts in advance. For such a defense to be acceptable, it must be proved that the victims were capable of giving informed consent, that offenses themselves were “consentable” (murder and statutory rape are examples of crimes that are not considered consentable); consent was not obtained by fraud; and the persons giving consent had authority to do so.

Excuses

Legal excuses for criminal behavior may be acceptable for defenses in situations in which the accused admit to committing the acts but provide satisfactory reasons why they should not be held responsible for those acts. Such defenses typically argue that the accused did not act from their own volition or free-will and thus did not have the true criminal intent necessary for criminal liability.

A common excuse is duress: being forced by others to do something wrong. The principle behind the idea of duress as a defense is that people who are forced to commit illegal acts should not be held responsible for those acts. An often-cited example of duress is cases involving persons who are forced to rob banks or commit other criminal acts while under gunpoint. The laws of different states vary on the specific circumstances in which duress defenses apply. However, the general rule is that if the lives of the accused—or others—are immediately threatened, the accused are judged to be under duress and excused from their behavior.

Involuntary intoxication is another legal excuse for criminal behavior. Involuntary intoxication may occur when people are forced, against their will, to consume alcohol or intoxicating drugs and when people consume intoxicants unknowingly, as when drugs are slipped into their drinks or food. Defendants who have been intoxicated under those conditions may be said to have lost their volition or free will. The validity of that type of defense may rest on the strength and dosage of the intoxicants that are involved.

Honest mistakes are sometimes accepted as legitimate excuses for criminal acts. A classic example of an honest mistake is a man leaving a restaurant with someone else’s umbrella, thinking it is his own. In such a case, no criminal act occurs because there is no criminal intent mens rea . Such situations are referred to as mistakes of fact. On the other hand, ignorance of the law itself is not an acceptable excuse, unless the accused has made a reasonable effort to learn the law.

The youthfulness of defendants may also be an acceptable excuse for criminal acts. The general assumption is that individuals cannot have true criminal intent until their brains have fully developed to make rational adult decisions. In the common-law tradition, persons under the age of seven are presumed to be psychologically incapable of committing criminal acts. In modern American law, the states vary on what constitutes the age of accountability. In most, the dividing line is fourteen years, but the modern trend has been to lower that age.

Another excuse is entrapment —being induced by government to commit crimes that the perpetrators would not otherwise commit. This defense to criminal responsibility arises from the idea that it is wrong for state authorities, usually undercover police officers, to encourage criminal behavior. When police officers play upon the weaknesses of individuals to lure them into committing criminal acts, such actions may be ruled entrapment, and evidence against the defendants would be barred according to the exclusionary rule.

The Insanity Defense

The principle behind the so-called insanity defense holds that persons who lack the mental capacity to form the intent to commit crimes cannot be held legally responsible for their criminal acts. For that defense to be acceptable, the defendants must be judged legally insane. States vary in the legal standards they use to determine the sanity of defendants.

One of the standards for measuring sanity is the so-called M’Naghten rule, or right-wrong test. This rule holds that persons who do not have the mental capacity to differentiate right from wrong do not have the intellectual awareness necessary to form criminal intent. To be held criminally responsible for their actions, defendants must be able to grasp the significance of their acts. A modified version of the M’Naghten rule is the irresistible impulse test. This latter test focuses more on the idea of volition to consider whether the accused have the ability to exercise free will to inhibit their criminal behavior. Persons who are judged to suffer from diseases of the mind so strong that they have lost the power to avoid committing criminal acts cannot be held criminally responsible according to this standard.

Under the substantial capacity test, “substantial capacity”—as defined by the American Legal Institute—is lost when persons lack the capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of their criminal acts at the time they commit them.

The insanity defense is often viewed by the media and public as a way for offenders to evade punishment for their criminal actions. However, the principle actually gives government the authority to incarcerate without conviction offenders who are judged to be mentally abnormal. The insanity defense is thus usually reserved for very serious cases. Defendants who are found to be legally insane in serious cases are often incarcerated in mental and psychiatric institutions for periods longer than the prison sentences that they would receive if they were convicted of the criminal charges against them. In the states of Montana, Utah, Idaho, and Kansas, the insanity defense is banned as of 2016.

A related defense is diminished capacity , a concept that stems from the idea that certain mental disorders may reduce offenders’ culpability for their criminal acts while falling short of rendering them legally insane. Successful diminished capacity defenses usually result in reductions of charges or less severe punishments of convicted defendants. The automatism defense comes into play when it can be claimed that the accused acted unconsciously or semiconsciously because of some physical problem or mental problem aside from insanity. Reasons for such behavior may include epilepsy, concussions, blackouts, childhood traumas, and brainwashing.

As medical and psychiatric professionals continue to decipher the mysteries and development of the human brain, it is likely that new mental-related defenses will emerge. Numerous syndromes have already been advanced as criminal defenses as they have been diagnosed by medical professionals. Many of these syndromes are creations of industrious defense attorneys, but others are fully acknowledged by medical and legal professionals. All, however, have been presented as defense at one time or another. Because defending the criminally accused is an ever-evolving endeavor—much as criminal law itself is—new defenses may always be expected to emerge.

Bibliography

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