In 2014, Jeff Weber brutally attacked a random man on the street with a hammer he had purchased moments before. The victim of the horrific attack was left partially blind and continues to struggles daily with other physical disabilities as a result. This is not Weber’s first brush with the law, he has been convicted of three very similar crimes in the past. However, each time he appeared in court he was found not criminally responsible (NCR). This time his lawyer plans argued the same thing. In September 2016, after his trial for the hammer attack, Weber was found NCR for the fourth time.
There has been mounting criticism over whether NCR promotes public safety or is a quick pass for prison. Cases like Weber’s were the driving force behind the Not Criminally Responsible Reform Act, Bill C-54, which was passed in 2014. Weber’s
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Lawyers could advise their clients not to plead NCR to avoid possibly lengthy and undetermined imprisonments. With a non-NCR plea, the corrections system must assign a fixed time length for a sentence. Unfortunately, such a tactic will swell the population of mentally ill intimates within the corrections system and further strain access to critical mental health resources. And it is probable that offenders who should have pled NCR but wound-up within the general population will be released in a worsened state then before they were sentenced.
In the case of Weber, where he has been considered NCR on three occasions before, it is a clear sign that the mental health system needs reform. However, the answer does not lie with having him committed for an indefinite period of time. On average less one percent of NCR individuals commits another crime after release. Demonstrating the current issue with the mental health system within forensic institutions is not the length of incarceration or quality of
In Dusky v. United States (1959), two standards are created for determining whether or not a person is competent to stand trial. These standards do not go without flaws and are questioned by psychologists and psychological research. Milton R. Dusky had a demanding life throughout his childhood and adult years. He became an alcoholic because of the challenges he confronted daily. He had little money, could barely keep a job, got divorced, and could not take care of his son.
Introduction Today’s criminal justice system is made up of many processes that work together in removing criminals from our streets and rehabilitating individuals to be functioning members of society. Though our current system has shown success in many areas there are still many ways that it could be improved. Through Brandon Bledsoe’s case progression, the strongest and weakest links in our criminal justice system will be highlighted.
Introduction and Summary: Chapter 11 focuses on the individuals with mental illness and the criminal justice system. Every year there are hundreds of thousands of individuals with mental illness who are arrested. The past decade a lot of the state hospital and mental health facilities have been shut down for lack of funding. Many of the seriously mentally ill are roaming the streets. The serious mental illness regarding this chapter would include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and severe depression.
More people get incarcerated for non-violent crimes and crimes caused by mental illnesses or drug abuse (Webb, 2009) and because these people get put in regular prisons, instead of in mental health facilities or facilities to help against drug addiction, where they could be treated to further prevent crimes driven by their illness (Webb, 2009), the prisons get overfilled and cannot hold the more ‘important’ prisoners that needed to be locked away from the public. A strong link of the criminal justice process is that the system tries to keep it fair for everyone. Every defendant has the right to an attorney so they can be defended properly and fairly and “Only judges who are adequately informed about a case can effectively control the proceedings and examine evidence” (Tochilovsky, 2002) It is also important for the criminal justice system that those involved show discretion and although this is not always the case, discretion by the judges, police, etc.
The Mental illness: These offenders suffer from a wide variety of mental illness from depression
This was later carried out through twenty-six other states, including the U.S., which created a precedent against the execution of the mentally ill in 1986. Even though the mentally ill cannot be executed, if the person who claimed mental illness is no longer mentally ill he or she can be executed. While the insanity plea proves that some criminals are mentally unstable, it should be used with caution because many convicted criminals abuse it during court cases, imitate being mentally ill during an examination, and are able to avoid the death penalty. Despite that the insanity plea can potentially help someone in defense for a mental illness case, many people can also take advantage of these precedents to alleviate their trials. The public in most insanity plea cases, do not typically agree with the rulings because most criminals use the
(Doc Zone, 2013, April 10) This treatment system, has been and continues to be effective. Studies demonstrate the consequences it would have if the system were to be abolished. "to choose prison over proper therapy in forensic psychiatric hospitals under NCR
Today there are more mentally ill people in prisons and jails in the United States than any hospital or psych facility in this country. Cook County Jail in Chicago, Illinois is the largest mental health institution in the country. When a mentally ill person gets arrested for a violent crime they stay three to four times longer than a regular violent offender. “One third of those incarnated in cook county jail suffers from psychological disorders.” According to a 2006 Justice Department study, more than half of prisoners in the United States Suffer from some sort of mental health problem.
Untie the Judges Hands Imagine you are a fifty-one year old man and you have not eaten in two days, and you resort to theft. Stealing a fifty-cent package of doughnuts from the corner store. You are at your home when suddenly officers burst in and arrest you.
The book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson brings awareness to the unfairness in the justice system and in our federal prisons. Incarceration of citizens suffering with mental health issues is a problem in our U.S prisons and the justice system but there are solutions to this problem like offering different programs to the mentally ill. In the book Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson gives a glimpse of the cruel, unjust sentencing practices problems we have with our justice system. Our prisons are flooded with inmates who suffer from a mental illness and with correction officers who are not properly trained to handle inmates who suffer from this hidden illness.
The case involves the murder of a man's wife and stolen property( this would be the woman’s purse ). The man was talking to the homicide detectives and classified the murderer as African American, knowing this they called young Brenton to come as he was walking and the man told the police it was him, he was the murder. Brenton and his family suffered as he was thrown in jail. The whole investigation was done sloppily, the beat him to get him to say what would fit the detective’s story, and they drafted a paper to say he was admitting to the crime and made him sign it. At the end the jury found him not guilty, he was released.
A therapist ONLY addressing an offender 's mental illness may be problematic because offenders have criminogenic needs that need to be treated in order to reduce criminal behavior. The Risk-Needs-Responsivity (RNR) model of corrections and rehabilitation was designed by Andrews, Honta, and Hoge in 1990. This model has demonstrated the strongest research-support on its ability to explain and treat criminal behavior. Andrews and Bonta have shown that in order to produce a successful rehabilitation program, the program must "respect the individual, have a psychological theory basis, and should work in junction with the enhancement of preventative services". This model reveals the importance of going beyond ONLY addressing an offender 's mental illness and providing treatment relevant to
The shift is attributed to the unexpected clinical needs of this new outpatient population, the inability of community mental health centers to meet these needs, and the changes in mental health laws (Pollack & Feldman, 2003). Thousands of mentally ill people flowing in and out of the nation 's jails and prisons. In many cases, it has placed the mentally ill right back where they started locked up in facilities, but these jail and prison facilities are ill-equipped to properly treat and help them. In 2006 the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that there were; 705,600 mentally ill inmates in state prisons, 78,000 in federal prisons, and
However, he is careful to state that he’s neither opposed to getting criminals off the street nor to incarceration. He just states that with all the advances made in neuroscience, it would be inappropriate for the legal system to treat everyone as if they have the power to make the right decisions in the first place. However, Eagleman also recognizes the legal implications of these advances as declaring people guilty or not guilty and determining appropriate legal punishments would become more complicated than before. At the end, he proposes ways in which neurobiological advances could be applied to help the mentally ill criminals to help them gain more self-control and more importantly, to keep them from going back to
Also, whether the CJS is doing enough to inhibit wrongful convictions and finally, the problems that parole can cause for a person maintaining their innocence. To begin, in