Judging Insanity, Punishing Difference: A History of Mental Illness in the Criminal Court (The Cultural Lives of Law)

In __Judging Insanity, Punishing Difference__, Chloé Deambrogio explores how developments in the field of forensic psychiatry shaped American courts' assessments of defendants' mental health and criminal responsibility over the course of the twentieth century. During this period, new psychiatric notions of the mind and its readability, legal doctrines of insanity and diminished culpability, and cultural stereotypes about race and gender shaped the ways in which legal professionals, mental health experts, and lay witnesses approached mental disability evidence, especially in cases carrying the death penalty. Using Texas as a case study, Deambrogio examines how these medical, legal, and cultural trends shaped psycho-legal debates in state criminal courts, while shedding light on the ways in which experts and lay actors' interpretations of "pathological" mental states influenced trial verdicts in capital cases. She shows that despite mounting pressures from advocates of the "rehabilitative penology," Texas courts maintained a punitive approach towards defendants allegedly affected by severe mental disabilities, while allowing for moralized views about personalities, habits, and lifestyle to influence psycho-legal assessments, in potentially prejudicial ways. "In Judging Insanity, Punishing Difference, Chloe Deambrogio explores how developments in the field of forensic psychiatry shaped American courts' assessments of defendants' mental health and criminal responsibility over the course of the 20th century. During this period, new psychiatric notions of the mind and its readability, legal doctrines of insanity and diminished culpability, and cultural stereotypes about race and gender shaped the ways in which legal professionals, mental health experts, and lay witnesses approached mental disability evidence, especially in cases carrying the death penalty. Using Texas as a case-study, Deambrogio examines how these medical, legal, and cultural trends shaped psycho-legal debates in state criminal courts, while shedding light on the ways in which experts and lay actors' interpretations of 'pathological' mental states influenced trial verdicts in capital cases. She shows that despite mounting pressures from advocates of the 'rehabilitative penology', Texas courts maintained a punitive approach towards defendants allegedly affected by severe mental disabilities, while allowing for moralized views about personalities, habits, and lifestyle to influence psycho-legal assessments, in potentially prejudicial ways"-- Provided by publisher Contents 7 List of Tables 9 Acknowledgments 11 Introduction 13 Part 1 THE BIOLOGICAL PARADIGM (1909–1952) 35 1 Heredity, Environment, and the Doctrine of Civilization 35 2 Biology, Insanity, and the Criminal Courts 60 Part 2 THE PSYCHOANALYTIC PARADIGM (1952–1976) 89 3 Psychoanalysis, the Insanity Defense, and the Family-Centered Ideology 89 4 Psychoanalysis and the Construction of the Criminal Psychopath 113 Part 3 THE NEW SCIENTIFIC PARADIGM (1976–2002) 143 5 The “New” Scientific Psychiatry, Antisocial Personality Disorder, and Future Dangerousness 143 6 The Abused and Neglected as a “Continuing Threat to Society” 170 Epilogue Forensic Psychiatry and Trial Practices in the Twenty-First Century 197 Appendix 209 Notes 217 References 259 Index 291