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.

In the meantime, we are describing it with the working label of 'FLR' (Fairly Large Rock)."

Poor Pluto.

I mean, a fairly large rock? That's all it gets?

I'm trying not think about the mother and the boy and the no Amen resulting in a child's death because that shit is fucked up.

I kind of think anyone who commits murder is bugfuck (but not legally) insane.

I kind of think anyone who commits murder is bugfuck (but not legally) insane.

Revenge killing, while wrong, strikes me as too logical to be insane.

It's a Fairly Large Rock. Can't wait to tell my friends. They don't have a Rock this Fairly Large.

I guess I even think of revenge killing as kinda crazy. What good does it do? Other than temporarily making me feel like I got even, how does it solve the ache of whatever loss I've sustained?