LETTER: Is your sanity in question?
I would guess that his letter has been circulated to every newspaper, great and small, in the land.
As any lawyer could (and should) tell him, there is a fundamental difference between the defence of ‘insanity’ and that of ‘diminished responsibility’. The plea of ‘insanity’ is very rarely used in UK, perhaps in a handful of cases per year. The defence of ‘diminished responsibility’ is more common, but only as a defence to a murder charge. It can rely on evidence of the accused’s mental condition, but not on testimony that ‘the person accused is insane’.
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Hide AdMr Daniels’ quotes extensively from the works of the late Professor, Doctor Thomas Szasz: an American psychiatrist who was a vocal critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry.
People who have come into contact with the mentally ill may well have a very different view on the reality of (say) schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or depression. Evidence of these conditions appears in a variety of criminal cases, not just those of murder; as does evidence of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, particularly in cases involving ex-servicemen.
Mr Daniels is the executive director of The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CHAR) in the United Kingdom, a branch of a ‘non-profit, non-political, non-religious international mental health watchdog’.
In fact CHAR is a grandly titled but privately established pressure group originating in the USA, where it was ‘co-founded’ in 1969 by the said Professor Szasz, and members of the Church of Scientology.
Alan Atkinson
Buxton