BPalmer wrote:
Macbeth wrote:
There is more than one kind of mental illness. Nobody with a normally functioning mind could do that.
Well, she is still culpable for her actions, but at the same time she has mental illness. I guess those two things can be true at the same time, without excusing the perpetrator's actions. If her mental illness were to be used to get off lightly, it would send the wrong message to society at large, which is what I was concerned about. I'm also wary of some criminal actions being pathologised.
Most criminal activities have a logical base. Wanting a car leads to stealing a car. Wanting crack leads to stealing stereos. Cause leads to effect, and though wrong, it is logical. Even murder can follow this pattern. Woman sleeps with other man, gets killed by husband.. cause.. effect. Shopkeeper gets in way of theft, gets shot.. cause.. effect. All of these make sense, even if they are wrong.
The insanity comes into play when actions make no sense. There are actually reasons why a mother might want to dispose of a newborn. They even follow a logical pattern. But if that disposal is carried out like this.. needlessly stabbing the infant hundreds of times.. then the act is no longer logical. It goes beyond mutiliation for identification purposes. The shop thief shoots the shopkeeper once.. that's a theft gone wrong. He shoots him 243 times then cuts off his leg and keeps it.. that's insane.
To my mind, if the act itself follows a logical course, you are culpable to one degree or another. Once it diverges into strangeness and illogical action, the mind is obviously not working normally.
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"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart,
that you can't take part" [Mario Savo, 1964]