ISSN : 2093-3843
Under section 10 of Korean Criminal Act, it exempts or mitigates punishment for mentally disordered offenders. On the other hand, the public fears that mentally disordered offenders are extremely dangerous and views legal insanity as a legal loophole through which many guilty people ‘escape’ criminal punishment. The purpose of this paper is to examine how frequently the insanity defense is used and how successful it is. We collected 1597 lower court cases which questioned defendant’s mental health. Insanity defense succeeds in only about 305 cases of these cases. The analysis of these cases indicates that successful insanity defense in Korea is extremely rare, less than one tenth of US cases. Mentally disordered defendants suffer schizophrenia, mood disorder, and intellectual disability, and they committed personal crimes such as murder, assault, or sexual assault rather than property crimes. In addition, characteristics of mentally disordered offenders are similar to those from previous studies. The legal and psychological implications of these results and future directions for research are discussed.
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