Based on author's thesis (doctoral - University of Oxford, 2020) issued under title: The mind on trial : mental illness and capital punishment in America's highest execution state. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents:
Heredity, environment, and the doctrine of civilization -- Biology, insanity, and the criminal courts -- Psychoanalysis, the insanity defense, and the family centered ideology -- Psychoanalysis and the construction of the criminal psychopath -- The "new" scientific psychiatry, antisocial personality disorder, and future dangerousness -- The abused and neglected as a "continuing threat to society" -- Epilogue : forensic psychiatry and trial practices in the 21st century.
Summary:
"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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.