Essays

The Criminal Responsibility of Psychopaths and the Insanity Defense

Psychopathy is a complicated term, and many associate the psychopath personality with serial killers such as Ted Bundy or Jeffery Dahmer. Although both Bundy and Dahmer did have psychopathic personality, not everyone with psychopathic personality will go on to commit atrocities. Psychopaths have the ability to function in society, just like any other personality type does. Unfortunately, many assume that "psychopath" is the same as "crazy". In a colloquial sense, that may be true. However, clinically speaking, a psychopath can be saner than the best of us. Due to the association of psychopathy and insanity, many are convicted that psychopathy is an adequate excuse for criminal responsibility. The law regarding the insanity defense and people with psychopathic personality may have changed over the years, but not drastically so. It is still clear that in order to utilize the insanity defense, a person must be severely cognitively impaired by internal forces. Psychopathy is not a mental disorder, and a psychopath is not exponentially controlled by the way their brain works.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by antisocial behavior, promiscuousness, superficial charm, manipulative behavior, impulsivity, shallow emotions, callousness, decreased empathy or remorse, and a grandiose sense of self-worth. Because of the complex nature of psychopaths, and the fascination that the psychology community has, multiple issues concerning the fate of psychopaths are debated constantly. One of the most prominent issues is whether a psychopath should be punished for their actions, and what can we as a society do to help them. In criminal trials, the insanity defense claims that the defendant was suffering from mental illness that impaired their ability to appreciate that they are doing something wrong—thus making the defendant not fully responsible for their actions. American Law Institute's Model Penal Code (1962) states that in order to have culpability, the person who committed the crime must have done so purposefully, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently.

There are those who argue that because psychopaths lack the genetic material required to understand fully the meaning of right and wrong, they cannot be held responsible for their crimes. In Neil Levy's "The Responsibility of the Psychopath Revisited", he claims that it is simply unfair to punish a psychopath. Levy compares a psychopath lacking proper moral understanding to a talentless artist, "It would be unfair to blame me for my bad art if I lack talent, because there was nothing I could reasonably have been expected to do to make myself a good artist." Some say that compassion is necessary for dealing with psychopaths. It is only ethical that moral persons with moral responsibility should show compassion to the lesser fortunate.

The opposing side, such as Ken Levy of Louisiana State University, contends that compassion is inappropriate regarding the punishment of psychopaths. The opposing side also claims that psychopaths are not incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong; they are just incapable of emotionally feeling the difference. A psychopath might not understand why something is right or wrong, but they have the capacity to know what the law demands. Psychopaths understand that there are consequences to their actions, and they act intentionally. They know what the law states, but they disregard the authority. You may not be able to hold a psychopath morally responsible, but they should be held criminally accountable. If a psychopath commits a crime, then they should pay the penalty, regardless of whether they understand the moral backing behind the law.

Some even argue that it is not a matter of whether you should or should not punish psychopaths; it is simply that you cannot punish psychopaths. Although psychopaths are not impervious to punishment, they lack the anticipation of punishment. Robert Hare, creator of the PCL-r, conducted a study on psychopaths while working as a prison psychologist at the maximum-security British Columbia Penitentiary. After gathering psychopathic and non-psychopathic volunteers, he administered a series of painful electric shocks to the subjects. Non-psychopathic volunteers would tense and prepare themselves before each shock, but the psychopathic volunteers would not even break a sweat. In Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test, Ronson states that Hare's tests "seemed to indicate that the amygdala, the part of the brain that should have anticipated the unpleasantness and sent the requisite signals of fear over to the central nervous system, wasn't functioning as it should."