ty 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, but they are unwilling to bring in a verdict of guilty on the top charge. The GMI verdict would allow them to split the difference. Finally the GMI verdict is fraudulent on the issue of treatment. As proposed, it makes no provision for treatment of the person who has been declared mentally ill. The GBI option has already proved to be a bogus reform. A 1981 Illinois law added the GMI as an additional verdict, retaining the traditional insanity defense. In Cook County, verdicts of not guilty by reason of insanity actually increased from 34 to 103 between 1981 and 1984. At the same time GMI went from 16 in 1982, the first year the option was available, to 87 in 1984. There has been much evidence of a "hydraulic" effect that was contrary to the law's intent. In both Illinois and Michigan, GMI verdicts involved people who would otherwise have been found guilty, not defendents who would have been found not guilty by reason of insanity (Walker, 1994;155-156). The real function of the GBI option is to appease public opinion. The public has little concern for the details of what actually happens to a mentally ill criminal defendent. Basically, it wants a symbolic statement of "guilty." In practice, the GMI verdict has as much meaning as "guilty but brown eyes." How dangerous is the ...
