![]() High-profile NGRI cases involving rich defendants with teams of experts may grab headlines and inflame the debate, but they are very rare. In most of the rest, the state didn't contest the NGRI claim, the defendant was declared incompetent to stand trial, or charges were dropped. In some studies, as many as 70 percent of NGRI defendants withdrew their plea when a state-appointed expert found them to be legally sane. Interestingly, states with higher rates of NGRI defenses tend to have lower success rates for NGRI defenses the percentage of all defendants found NGRI is fairly constant, at around 0.26 percent. ![]() While rates vary from state to state, on average less than one defendant in 100-0.85 percent- actually raises the insanity defense nationwide. Some states allow an NGRI defense either when defendants lack awareness that what they did was wrong (called mens rea, or literally "guilty mind") or lack the ability to resist committing the crime ( actus rea, "guilty act"), while other states only recognize mens rea defenses. One problem with discussing NGRI is that there are, strictly speaking, 51 types of insanity defense in the United States-one for each set of state laws, and one for federal law. Research on NGRI fails to support most of these claims but some serious problems may exist with NGRI. Critics of NGRI have claimed that too many sane defendants use NGRI to escape justice that the state of psychological knowledge encourages expensive "dueling expert" contests that juries are unlikely to understand and that, in practice, the defense unfairly excludes some defendants. It is important to note that "insanity" is a legal term, not a psychological one, and experts disagree whether it has valid psychological meaning. The "not guilty by reason of insanity" (NGRI) verdict rests in part on two assumptions: that some mentally ill people cannot be deterred by the threat of punishment, and that treatment for the defendant is more likely to protect society than a jail term without treatment. The idea that some people with mental illness should not be held responsible for crimes they commit dates back to the Roman Empire, if not earlier. Often, the sentence will substitute psychiatric treatment in place of jail time. The insanity defense allows a mentally ill person to avoid being imprisoned for a crime on the assumption that he or she was not capable of distinguishing right from wrong.
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