Criminal Responsibility, Assessment of

Mental health professionals are frequently asked to evaluate criminal defendants to assist the courts in determining whether those individuals may have been legally insane (i.e., not criminally responsible) at the time of their crimes. This entry discusses the legal concept of and criteria for insanity, as well as the challenges that forensic experts face in conducting these evaluations.

In contemporary Western society, prohibited behaviors are typically codified in the criminal law, and most citizens are held to be responsible to obey these laws. Individuals who violate the law may be prosecuted and, if convicted, punished for their behavior. Such individuals are said to be “criminally responsible,” a label that reflects the moral and legal judgment that the person had neither a justification nor an excuse for his or her behavior, should have known better, and must endure the punishment as a corrective mechanism intended to discourage the recurrence of such behavior.

As the last sentence indicates, behavior that on its face appears to be criminal may in some circumstances not warrant the legal and moral conclusion that the actor is “guilty” or “criminally responsible.” For example, under most circumstances, it is unlawful to take the life of another person, yet doing so in “self-defense” (the victim was threatening the life of the actor) may constitute a justification that precludes a finding of guilt. Similarly, taking money from another person (robbery), when performed under duress (a third-party threatens to kill the actor's child unless the money is taken), may be seen as justified because of the greater harm (death of the child) that was avoided by robbing the victim.

There are other individuals, or classes of individuals, who may be exempt or excused from judgments of “criminally responsible,” not because of extraordinary or justifying circumstances, but because of individual characteristics or features that render them, in society's eyes, incapable of making the appropriate moral and legal judgments required to behave appropriately and (perhaps also) incapable from benefiting from punishment as a corrective measure. For our purposes, two such classes of individuals will be mentioned, both of which have been recognized in Western cultures, literally for centuries, as inappropriate targets for judgments of moral and legal culpability.

The first class of individuals is children, who, because of youthful age, lack of life experience, and mental or emotional immaturity, are considered not accountable as moral actors in the way that adults are held accountable for their behavior. Although exceptional cases may be found, the law has generally considered it an unrebuttable assumption that children at the age of 7 years and younger may not be held to adult standards of criminal responsibility, whereas there is a rebuttable assumption that children between the ages of 7 and 14 years are not moral agents to be held to adult standards of criminal responsibility.

The second group or class of individuals, and the one of primary focus here, comprises individuals with significant mental disorders whose symptomatology contributes to their “criminal behavior” in specific ways that society deems excuses them from moral culpability (criminal responsibility). In more common legal parlance, these individuals are considered “legally insane” or “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

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