at last proven. These judgements include not guilty by reason of insanity (NGI), and guilty but mentally ill (GMI), with the later verdict not being implemented until the early eighties in an attempt to reform the insanity defense and decrease the amount of NGI verdicts. The NGI verdict is the more dangerous verdict and the one which I believe has the strongest argument against the insanity defense. The objection here is that it allows dangerous men to return to the streets where they commit heinous crimes. Of the 300 persons committed on NGI verdicts 80 percent were released from mental hospitals by psychiatrists, and in several instances these mental patients went on to kill again (Jeffery, 1985;73). My belief is that psychiatrists and mental hospitals do not cure the mentally ill. This is the reality of the insanity defense which I find irrefutable; in many cases criminals are released due to loopholes such as the insanity defense to simply commit the same crime again. Even is these cases make up 10 out of 100,000, there now exist 10 crimes that need not have happened. The guilty but mentally ill approach has three serious flaws. First it strikes indirectly at the mens rea requirement, introducing the slippery notion that the accused had partial, but not complete, criminal intent. Second, it creates a lesser and included offense that judges and juries may choose as simply a compromise verdict. They believe the accused probably did something wrong and deserves some punishment, ...
