ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, the regulation of criminal insanity and the management of legally insane offenders in the Norwegian criminal justice system underwent significant reforms. The insanity clause was revised, along with the role of expert witnesses in insanity determinations and the regulation of compulsory care orders for legally insane offenders who are assessed as dangerous. Taking a socio-legal perspective, this Chapter discusses the process of legal change; the societal protection and legal certainty considerations that drove it; and the lively public, political, scholarly, and intra- and inter-professional debates that accompanied it. The developments and debates in Norway provide a good illustration of how the mentally ill offender is at the same time a patient: frontier territory where multiple, sometimes divergent professional logics are enforced simultaneously. This multiplicity – and occasionally, tension – raises questions that pertain to: the relationship between legal and medical conceptual categories in the statutory definition and forensic evaluation of criminal insanity; the compatibility between the different goals and modes of operating of law and medicine; the ethical obligations of the forensic expert witness (as opposed to the clinician); and the role of public perceptions of forensic expertise in a highly politicised area of criminal justice such as insanity. These questions do not have a technical nature and are not likely to be answered by new mental-state assessment techniques and technologies.
