Phoenix Criminal Defense Guest Blog Post - Mental Illnesses in the Courtroom:

#163559905 / gettyimages.com

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.

It's a Mad World: The Insanity Plea in the James Holmes Case and Washington, D.C.

Saint Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D.C. public psychiatric facility.

James Holmes was charged with 166 counts of murder, attempted murder and other related offenses from his July 20, 2012 shooting rampage in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater that left twelve dead and at least fifty-eight injured.  According to his attorneys, Holmes was in "the throes of a psychotic episode when he committed acts that resulted in the tragic loss of life."  With this admission and the District Court Judge's acceptance of Holmes’s plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, the scope of the trial was transformed from a determination of factual guilt to whether or not Holmes was sane, and thus culpable for his actions.  Insanity pleas have been around since ancient times, and the defense is based on the notion that some people with mental illnesses because of a lack of understanding or because of an inability to resist an urge are not culpable for their actions.  As the defense has developed through time, it has been inconsistently applied throughout the states.