ABSTRACT

A person satisfies the culpability requirements of an offense typically will be enough to establish the blameworthiness for one’s rule violation that makes criminal liability appropriate. While assumptions of sanity, maturity, sobriety, and absence of coercion normally are correct and applicable in most cases, in the unusual case a person may have a disability-insanity, immaturity, involuntary intoxication, or coercion-and its effects may be such that he or she cannot reasonably be expected to have avoided the criminal violation. The class of excuses that is called “disability excuses” because society’s reduced expectations for the conduct of the person come from some sort of disability or abnormality of the person. Surveys and experiments that attempt to discover lay definitions of insanity constitute the second approach that previous researchers have applied to the study of the insanity defense. The entrapment defense is almost unique to the United States, and there is a great deal of variety among different US jurisdictions in defining it.