When someone has visited a bar to have a few drinks before
making the dangerous decision to drive home, any accident they cause as a
result of negligence will be their fault. They made the initial choice to go for a drink
and then drive home afterwards, as opposed to catching a taxi or getting a friend
to come and pick them up. Therefore, in
any legal case involving such circumstances, the drunk driver is almost always
at fault; they made an ill-thought-out choice and must face the consequences after
sobering up and coming to terms with the damage they have done.
But what about those who have inadvertently caused an
accident because they suffer from a mental illness? What if someone who is not in total control of
their intellectual faculties fails to understand that they did something morally
wrong? For example, in many mass
shootings across the U.S. in recent years, the perpetrators have almost universally
suffered from some kind of mental illness and chosen to plea insanity,
including James Eagan Holmes, the perpetrator of the 2012 shooting in an Aurora theater.
