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The Irresistible Naghten Rule Of Insanity

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The Irresistible Naghten Rule Of Insanity
The M'Naghten Rule is used for testing legal insanity, sometimes refereed to as the "right-wrong" test which is used by most states, Criminal defendants that are found to be legally insane cannot be convicted of charges arising from that specific mental defect or disability. Courts use one of these legal tests to determine whether a defendant truly is legally insane. (The M'Naghten Rule (n.d.).

The M'Naghten Rule focuses on determining if a criminal defendant knew he or she was committing a crime or understood right from wrong at the time it was committed. The defendant has to meet one of the two different criteria. Many courts are different, looking at whether the "wrong" in question refers to the moral or legal wrong (or both). In addition, …show more content…
The Irresistible Impulse Test

The Irresistible Impulse Test was initially adopted by the Alabama Supreme Court in the 1887 case of Parsons v. State. The Alabama court stated that even though the defendant could tell right from wrong, he was subject to “the duress of such mental disease and he had lost the ability to choose between right and wrong” and that “his free agency was at the time destroyed,” and therefore, “the alleged crime was so connected with such mental disease, in the relation of cause and effect, as to have been the product of it solely” (Irresistible Impulse Test. (n.d.).
The court assigned accountability for the crime to the mental illness regardless of the defendant’s ability to differentiate right from wrong (Irresistible Impulse Test.(n.d.). Penal Code

The Model Penal Code recognizes four different levels of men’s rea; purpose, knowledge, recklessness, and negligence. The main feature added to the Model Penal Code's system is that unless the statute specifically states otherwise, the defendant must commit all elements of the crime with a mental state of recklessness or greater. (Model Penal Code's Mens Rea.
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