Identifying insanity acquittals: is it any easier?
Following the highly publicized insanity acquittal of John Hinckley in 1982, legislators throughout the country attempted to reform the insanity defense. At the time, policy makers had virtually no empirical evidence with which to guide their reforms. The focus of this research is to determine if more informed policy-making would be possible today? Results show that more states are able to identify cases involving an insanity acquittal than during the 1980's and provide annual data on the number of rate of insanity acquittals. The data collected by many of the states have significant limitation.
Cirincione
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Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut, Storrs 06269-1024, USA.
Jacobs
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D003625:Data Collection; D006801:Humans; D007298:Insanity Defense / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011050:Policy Making; D014481:United States