legal experts say her extreme faith doesn't make her criminally insane.

Well I totally agree with that. I don't think religion should be an issue in determining mental competence.

If my extreme faith leads to the same results as someone else's insanity with a similar lack of agreement with conventional right and wrong, though?

This Ricola better work. The Chloraseptic I gravitated towards had saccharin. But it looked more convincing.

If my extreme faith leads to the same results as someone else's insanity with a similar lack of agreement with conventional right and wrong, though?

I think there is a difference between not being able to distinguish between right and wrong and knowing you are doing something wrong according to the law or socially accepted morality, but are justifying it due to religious faith.

If a religious fanatic plants a bomb that kills someone and justifies it with his or her faith would that person be allowed to plead insanity? It shouldn't be any different than murdering a toddler.

Found three dead baby bunnies at work today. Looked like they'd been still-born, or birthed and abandoned to the elements (naturally fallen fruit and nuts were scarce last fall, maybe mummie knew that she couldn't take care of them...) As much as we have a rabbit problem at work (along with groundhogs, chipmunks, and the occasional deer), it's still sad to see. Their ears were still slicked back along their heads and their little fur coats still slicked down. Or maybe a hawk got mom, but why birth them out of the warren?

Boss won't give me a budget to spend on nuts and fruit for the critters to distract them from the pansies and violas that I'm planting out.

But, FLOWERS!!!! Okay, okay, the witch hazel and snow drops and helleborus have been blooming for a month now, as well as a crazy viburnum with fragrant pink flowers. And now the early magnolias and irises and chionodoxa are beginning. There's a few spots of southern slopes where the daffodils are braving the weather, and the lungwort and virginia bluebell and blooming in my favorite colour.

If a religious fanatic plants a bomb that kills someone and justifies it with his or her faith would that person be allowed to plead insanity.

If they're insane, sure. It just sounded too much like having a religious argument for your actions is incompatible with being bugfuck insane in the eyes of the court. I don't think it should be, and I think it's a really hard line to draw. If aliens told me my child would come back to life I'm crazy, unless it's a space clam, and then I'm just a Scientologist and not crazy at all.

If my extreme faith leads to the same results as someone else's insanity with a similar lack of agreement with conventional right and wrong, though?

Craxy is as craxy does?

More seriously, I was brought up to believe that there were the laws of God, and the laws of Man, and God wanted us to also obey the laws of Man. Therefore, using God as an excuse to flout Man's law would be an affront to God. One's religion/faith may vary.

It just sounded too much like having a religious argument for your actions is incompatible with being bugfuck insane in the eyes of the court.

I don't think they are incompatible, I just think, though it is difficult, that mental competence should be weighed regardless of religion. I'll admit that isn't easy.

I hate to say it but the mental competency of criminal defendants doesn't often make a difference in the court system. They have to be feces-smearing, drooling, raving lunatics (and in that case, if they're docile when medicated they're often shuffled through and imprisoned in regular prisons anyway).

They even have a "guilty but insane" plea that is very effective. The crazy person pleads guilty, goes to prison where they receive next to no mental health care in prison.

I'm not saying let crazy people who commit heinous crimes go free but caging them in regular prisons isn't the answer, either.

BTW, the woman in this case should be free in a year as a result of her plea bargain. It sounds like the prosecutor really needed her testimony against the other cult people involved.

It just sounded too much like having a religious argument for your actions is incompatible with being bugfuck insane in the eyes of the court.

No, it's just not sufficient-- it doesn't meet the standard for insanity by itself. Having any explanation or no explanation is not* necessarily related to the question of whether a defendant understands the nature and quality of his actions. The courts don't care whether religion mixes in there or not. The real problem with the article is that they've asked for a legal opinion on something not in controversy.

*I left the "not" out when I first posted this.