We still see regular news stories about one criminal or another being sentenced to the state’s mental health system after pleading mental incompetence.
“Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity” (NGRI) is an aspect of criminal procedure, defined in the Missouri Revised Statutes Chapter 552 Section 30 as “A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if, at the time of such conduct, as a result of mental disease or defect such person was incapable of knowing and appreciating the nature, quality, or wrongfulness of such person’s conduct.”
The normal result of the court’s acceptance of an NGRI plea is the involuntary commitment of the accused to the Department of Mental Health for custody in a secure state mental health facility.
CCHR has documented many thousands of individual cases that demonstrate that psychiatric drugs and other brutal psychiatric practices actually create insanity and cause violence. Particularly, the neuroleptic [nerve seizing] drugs forced onto patients in institutions and in the community not only create the sort of violence or mental incompetence that would give apparent cause for involuntary incarceration, they also place the patient at greater risk mentally and physically.
When psychiatry entered the justice and penal systems, it did so under the subterfuge that it understood man, that it knew not only what made man act as he did, but that it knew how to improve his lot. This was a lie. Psychiatry has had opportunity to prove itself. The experiment has been a miserable failure.
In the 1940s, psychiatry’s leaders proclaimed their intention to infiltrate the field of the law and bring about the “re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong.”
[Canadian Psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm]
A 1954 decision by the Federal Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. held that a mentally defective person is not criminally responsible for unlawful acts. This, and the psychiatric industry jumping on the NGRI bandwagon, has lead to a massive erosion of public confidence in the justice system’s ability to mete out swift and equitable justice.
Once there was the idea that a person is responsible for his own actions; so how is it that we face the absurd situation of psychiatrists testifying to excuse the wrongdoers’ actions?
It all started in 1812, when psychiatrist Benjamin Rush claimed that crime was a mental disease, curable by psychiatry.
Today, psychiatric “expert witnesses” are paid an average of $3,600 per day to testify for whomever is willing to foot the bill.
The late Dr. Thomas Szasz said, “Crimes are acts we commit. Diseases are biological processes that happen to our bodies. Mixing these two concepts by defining behaviors we disapprove of as diseases is a bottomless source of confusion and corruption.” If a dangerous offense is committed by a person, then the fact remains criminal statutes exist to address this. As Szasz also said, “All criminal behavior should be controlled by means of the criminal law, from the administration of which psychiatrists ought to be excluded.”
Compassion decrees that the criminal must be given the opportunity to face up to what he has done and reform himself to become a productive member of the group. In this way justice benefits the individual and society.
Psychiatry’s attempt to eradicate the concept of right and wrong and thereby destroy personal responsibility by inventing excuses for the most flagrant misconduct, undermines the justice system.
Recommendations
1. First and foremost it should be recognized that every person is responsible for his or her own actions and must be held accountable for their actions.
2. State and federal legislators should repeal any laws permitting the insanity defense and diminished capacity pleas.
3. Judges, attorneys and law enforcement officers need to ensure that psychiatric evidence is removed from the courts and that psychiatrists and psychologists are no longer afforded “expert” status.
4. Remove psychiatrists and psychologists as advisors or as counselors from police forces, prisons and criminal rehabilitation and parole services. Because psychiatrists have no scientific foundation for their claims, do not permit them to render opinions about or to treat drug addiction, criminal behavior and delinquency, or to probe for alleged dangerous behavior.
5. Prosecute as a criminal offense any and all cases of physical damage caused through psychiatry’s use of electroshock, brain surgery or abusive drug “treatment.”
For more information and the full history of psychiatry’s corruption of justice, download and read the CCHR booklet “Eroding Justice – Psychiatry’s Corruption of Law – Report and recommendations on psychiatry subverting the courts and corrective services“.
