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this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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I just don't see how deluding yourself into believing an alternate reality is a defense. Not if you are of sound mind; which I don't think you can argue that the entire MAGA movement 'isnt of sound mind', they're easily 1:20 people in this country.
I'm pretty sure the "sound mind" thing doesn't work like that anyway. The insanity defence, for anyone who doesn't already know, is not a claim that you're too coocoo town banana pants to go to prison for crimes you have no credible defense for. The insanity plea is a claim that the defendant straight up doesn't understand, and may in fact be incapable of learning how to understand, right from wrong. They may confess immediately to a murder for instance, believing that there was no wrong in murdering, due to the severity of their own delusions.
Yeah a plea of insanity changes the conditions of everything. It is pleading guilty to the actions and acknowledging the need for the defendant to be removed from society. It’s saying “please send me to a psychiatric treatment facility instead of a prison”. Suffering from delusional thinking to the extent that you break into a representative’s house and attack their spouse with a hammer isn’t the sort of condition that gets you thrown on the streets after a little bit. It’s the sort of condition that gets you put in a prison’s psych ward for possibly life.
We don’t accept innocence by way of insanity out of the goodness of our hearts but because if we treat the criminally insane like ordinary criminals they’re just going to go out after release and do it again or they’re going to get themselves seriously hurt in prison.
Ok, but like, this final part:
Can that not be extended to the actions of the insurrectionists on J6, or Trumps multiple attempts at a coup? If they truly believed the election was actually stolen? I'm not arguing this should be the case, but self believe to me isn't sufficient. Righteously believing yourself to be correct doesn't make you correct.
Also, I don't know that any kind of 'sound mind' or insanity argument really has any meaning when we're talking about a group of people on the order of, conservatively 1 million Americans, maybe as high as 15-25 million Americans? Some where between a half a percent and 15% of US citizens are basically, bat shit insane, when it comes to their material world view.