What Is A Temporary Insanity Plea?

A temporary insanity plea, according to the legal definition, is a claim by defense lawyers that their client was insane, for a brief time, when the crime was committed. This defense emphasizes that the accused person did not understand the serious nature of the crime he or she is alleged to have committed. Legal precedent shows that it is possible to be temporarily insane during the commission of a sudden, violent attack on another person, or committing a crime when intense passion is involved.

Defense attorneys may find it difficult to prove temporary insanity, after claiming that the client was not stable mentally or emotionally when the crime was committed. In many cases, the individual accused of committing the crime has not been examined by a psychiatrist before so there is prior basis on which to base an insanity defense. The evidence presented for this plea is the action itself and psychiatric examination after the incident.

Related defense tactics include such ideas as: the diminished-capacity in which the accused doesn’t completely understand his or her actions and the crime committed after a long history of physical and mental abuse from the victim (against the accused).

Legal history and case records show that the use of the temporary insanity as a defense is not nearly as common as it might appear from movies and television, or from rumor. Some commentators on the legal scene note that this defense is in fact quite rare. Most attorneys and judges go through a lifelong legal career without ever having to work with this defense or hear it from the bench.

Psychiatric histories also show that it is very rare for a person to be sane at one moment and insane the next, even in the most heated moments of passionate or hate. The general consensus of the medical and mental-health fields is that only the chronically insane person is unable to tell the difference between right and wrong. People who go through their lives in a normal fashion 99 percent of the time may commit a violent crime or crime of passion and know it is wrong as they are doing it.

The insanity plea may be more common, since it is often based on a life history of diminished mental capacity or inability to understand what is real and what is not. Legal records show that the temporary insanity plea is not the key to open freedom’s door, as laymen might believe. Those within the legal community understand the difficulty of proving temporary insanity. In addition, if a person and his or her attorney would succeed in getting the judge or jury to declare “temporary insanity” the person is usually subject to a program of psychiatric examinations and is held in a hospital setting (rather than in a jail or prison).

The convicted individual is not any more free than if they had been sentenced to prison, though the facilities are quite different. The only difference might be that they aren’t sentenced to spend years behind bars.

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