Word: evil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hinckley's insult our gut instincts and our primitive sense of justice. "Is Hinckley's crime," the trial prosecutor asked, "the crime of someone who does not know what he is doing and who is out of control, or is it the crime of someone who has an evil, twisted and perverted mind?" The difference between being sick and depressed, psychotic and merely "sad at Christmas," underscored the trial debate. While the prosecution emphasized Hinckley's act, the defense attempted to show that the illogical, disjointed association between Hinckley's violence and his fantasy world was sign of process schizophrenia...
...mean abandoning the idea on which the Anglo-American system of criminal justice rests--that of man as a responsible agent with free will...By overlooking concerns that a man's will (can be) limited by mental illness, so that he would be unable to choose between good and evil as the criminal law now requires, Attorney General William French Smith...calls for a fundamental change in American jurisprudence...
...were loud, political and, according to Caplan, inconclusive. The hope was somehow to reconcile that natural gut reaction which sees the act, the victim, the murderer and calls a spade a spade with the more informed need to preserve conceptions of human will, avoid the connection between illness and evil, and abstain from seeking the hypocritical solution of committing the sick to prisons that offer no treatment or hospitals that are no better than prisons. Discussion centered on two legal reforms: allowing for a verdict of guilty but insane; and restricting the scope of the defense by limiting judgment...
...cynical and callous assessment of the status of a fellow citizen. The proposed mens rea standard (already accepted in certain states) seems ambiguous at best. The question of intent or motivation, separate from the crucial one of illness, is thorny and puts us closer to equating illness with "evil." In any case, restricting a legal rule will hardly deter the actions of those who would normally use it. The convicted ill would only become mistreated, untreated prisoners. The small numbers and type of accused, it seems, must force the debate into less charted ground and away from simplistic solutions...
...Game; the Crimson against the Elis; the ultimate test of the forces of Good against the forces of Evil; the sissies against the preppies...