ABSTRACT
In the usual case, the issue of the mental health or illness of a defendant to charges of felony crime arises if and only if the defendant elects on his or her own initiative to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. Should the status of the defendant’s mental illness rise to a level that meets the legislativelydefined criteria for an insanity defense in the relevant jurisdiction [Note 1], a judicial finding reflecting that plea is entered, so that the defendant is formally declared not guilty of the felonious act, with the customary result that he or she is confined to a public mental hospital (often, a hospital “for the criminally insane”) until he or she has been declared no longer psychologically disordered, usually both by the mental health authorities responsible for treatment and by the court which declared the defendant “not guilty by reason of insanity” [Note 2]. The usual case, therefore, involves a neatly compartmentalized disjunction between mental illness (or, at the least, between mental illness serious enough to rise to the level of an insanity defense) and criminal guilt.
