Abstract:
This chapter discusses homicide in the criminal law, which can be divided into the following categories: murder, manslaughter, infanticide, and a number of specific offences concerned with causing death while driving. It considers suicide pacts, mercy killing, and euthanasia, homicide statistics, non-homicide killings, and diminished responsibility. Significant academic and political energy is put into homicide law, given the relatively few homicide offences that take place each year. What this reveals is that the law’s approach to homicide has great symbolic importance in both political and legal terms.Keywords:
Homicide
Criminal responsibility
Diminished responsibility
The article emphasizes the problem of diminished responsibility in Georgian criminal law. The research pays attention to the historicalaspect of diminished responsibility and problem of free will in criminal behavior of a person with diminished responsibility.The article provides information about the list and characteristics of psychical anomalies and other circumstances that cause diminishedresponsibility. The research discusses the issue of relationship between the guilt and diminished responsibility. Accordingly, in author’sopinion, diminished responsibility includes all circumstances (except mental illness) that mitigate one’s guilt at the time of committingcrime, in spite of its causing grounds.At the same time, the article gives a new definition of diminished responsibility that differs from legislative definition.
Georgian
Criminal responsibility
Diminished responsibility
Legal Responsibility
Collective responsibility
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Diminished responsibility is a partial defence to murder which, if proven, reduces criminal liability for unlawful homicide from murder to manslaughter. This paper contends that given the vagueness, uncertainty and practical difficulties associated with the defence of diminished responsibility, it should be abolished completely in Australia as the very breadth of the defence, allows a coach and horses to be driven through criminal responsibility for murder. It will be contended that the availability of the defence of diminished responsibility is not appropriate even in jurisdictions such as Queensland and the Northern Territory which retain a mandatory life sentence for murder. Furthermore, it will be argued that attempts to reformulate the defence of diminished responsibility are akin to seeking to glue back together a shattered vessel.
Diminished responsibility
Criminal responsibility
Homicide
Vagueness
Criminal Liability
Punishment (psychology)
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There are two different ways in which the insanity defence could he constructed. These relate to different ways in which the insanity defence might question the responsibility of the accused. Either the defence might show that the act in question was not performed in the appropriate way (that the accused lacks attribution-responsibility) or it might show that the agent was not an appropriate subject for criminal responsibility (that he or she lacks capacity-responsibility). Sometimes it is thought that these possibilities collapse into each other: it is only those that cannot perform their acts in the appropriate way that lack the capacity to be criminally responsible. This essay shows three things: first, that Scots criminal law, at least since the nineteenth century, is in a state of confusion between a capacity-responsibility conception of the defence and an attribution-responsibility conception. Second, that capacity-responsibility does not collapse into attribution-responsibility: there are some agents who are capable of forming mens rea but who ought not to be made criminally responsible due to their mental disorder. Third, that a sophisticated account of the capacity-responsibility conception can provide a version of the insanity defence that is both theoretically more elegant and practically more advantageous than the attribution-responsibility conception that has found favour in England and in some Scots decisions.
Criminal responsibility
Diminished responsibility
Mens rea
Mental capacity
State Responsibility
Culpability
Insanity defense
Confusion
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This article explores what is meant when children are held responsible for their behavior in the criminal justice system. It does so by examining the age at which children are held responsible in criminal law and contrasts this approach with that taken in family law. It is argued that the concept of responsibility itself is being manipulated and that the different approaches taken by criminal law and family law have not been justified. It recommends that serious consideration be given to the development of a Gillick - type test of competency in criminal law to protect young children from the consequences of their immature actions.
Criminal responsibility
Diminished responsibility
Criminal procedure
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To explore the main factors that most influence the psychiatrists in the process of assessing the capacity for criminal for perpetrators of homicide.105 homicide cases were retrospectively analyzed.The number of cases for no responsibility, reduced responsibility and full responsibility is 41 (39.0%), 28 (26.7%) and 36 (34.3%) respectively. The assessment of capability for criminal responsibility was significantly correlated with three major factors, they are: whether the homicide was driven by psychopathological factors (Gamma = 0.906, P = 0.000), whether the perpetrator was suffering a severe mental disorders (Gamma = 0.761, P = 0.000) and, whether the victim is the perpetrator's family member or relative (Gamma = 0.412, P = 0.000).Forensic psychiatrists take three major aspects into account in their process in assessing capacity for criminal responsibility, in a descending order, they are: was the homicide driven by pathological motivation? Was the perpetrator suffering from a severe mental disorder? Was the victim a family member or stranger?
Homicide
Criminal responsibility
Diminished responsibility
Forensic psychiatry
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New criminal law promulgated in 1997 changed corresponding criminal responsibility age from former 5 kinds to 8 ones, and revised legislative phraseology in many spheres. However, a series of questions also exist in new criminal law, such as; whether stipulated charge also includes related ones; When worse details of crime includes crime this item stipulated, how to handle that, etc. Finally, the author gives solvable ways: to renew theory, to explain by law and to revise legislation, etc.
Criminal responsibility
Phraseology
Criminal Code
Criminal procedure
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Diminished responsibility is a partial defence to murder
which, if proven, reduces criminal liability for unlawful
homicide from murder to manslaughter. This paper contends that given the vagueness, uncertainty and practical difficulties associated with the defence of diminished responsibility, it should be abolished completely in Australia as the very breadth of the defence, allows a coach and horses to be driven through criminal responsibility for murder. It will be contended that the availability of the defence of diminished responsibility is not appropriate even in jurisdictions such as Queensland and the Northern Territory which retain a mandatory life sentence for murder.
Furthermore, it will be argued that attempts to reformulate
the defence of diminished responsibility are akin to seeking
to glue back together a shattered vessel.
Diminished responsibility
Criminal responsibility
Homicide
Criminal Liability
Punishment (psychology)
Culpability
Vagueness
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Citations (13)
Objective:To investigate the limited criminal responsibility in forensic psychiatric expertise. Method:Ninty-five cases identified with diminished responsibility were analyzed. Results:The judicial appraisal of diminished responsibility could be used in forensic psychiatric expertise. Conclusion:The following cases might be evaluated diminished responsibility:(1)No direct relationship between psychotic symptoms and criminal behavior.(2)Mild and moderate mental retardation.(3)Secondary personality change not associated with the disease.(4)Other mental disorders.
Criminal responsibility
Diminished responsibility
Forensic psychiatry
Mental disease
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Diminished responsibility
Criminal responsibility
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