Tennessee Criminal Lawyer Blog

The insanity defense is perhaps the most famous defense in all of criminal law. It is frequently used in capital murder cases and with good reason. Jurors are more willing to buy into an insanity defense if the crime for which the defendant was charged seems like a crime no sane or rational person could commit (for example, an especially heinous murder or the murder of a young child). Also, it may quite simply be the only defense that is available to a defendant who seems to have been caught red-handed and has a mountain of evidence piled up against him.

The insanity defense is also a tough defense to raise successfully. Tennessee law places a heavy burden on defendants by requiring them to prove by clear and convincing evidence that they were in such a state of mind that they did not know the nature and quality of the acts they committed or did not know that their actions were wrong. This is made even tougher by Tennessee’s requirement that the defendant must prove that he or she was insane at the time of the offense in question, meaning a prior or subsequent history of mental defect may be irrelevant for all intents and purposes if the defendant cannot prove his or her state of mind at the time of the offense.

While these legal hurdles are tough, there is also one huge practical hurdle to raising an insanity defense: juries are skeptical of the defense because it is used so often. Legal news outlets and television shows make it seem as if every person who is charged with a serious crime in the United States falls back on the insanity defense, and in truth a lot of defendants do. Therefore jurors tend to think that it is a type of catch-all defense that guilty people generally use as a last resort. This is not the case, but it does lead to a skewed perception of the defense of insanity. This does not mean, however, that an insanity defense is not the appropriate course of action for a particular defendant given the facts and circumstances of his or her case. What it does mean is that defendants should hire skilled criminal defense counsel who can expertly present the defense to the jury in order to maximize its effectiveness.