Yukaphile wrote: ↑Tue Sep 10, 2019 8:01 am
He was probably lying.
The point aside from that if one assumes he did this 100% completely unaware does that change anything. Similar is someone with genuine multiple personality syndrome and what another personality might do.
I agree that case is a dubious application of the insanity defense. Note part of the problem is that the person shows consciousness of their actions in some respects in that they took actions to cover it up etc.(all while sleep walking supposedly), so their actions show response to inferences about their consequences (If I don't cover this up I will be found out that would be bad etc.).
I agree. To me and the point I'm making, even if that wasn't him, the conscious self, doing it, there was some other aspect of him thinking and acting even if it's not exactly the "him" we'd commonly think.
Another example in the TED Talk-like thing I watched was a guy who had brain surgery and one hemisphere was anesthetized to facilitate the removal of tumor. Out of sync with that hemisphere, the other took over completely and apparently manifested a new personality, one which was, lewd, jocular and sexist, completely different from the calm, reserved nerdy guy who he normally was. With the surgery over the anesthetic wore off and his old personality reasserted itself, something which the speaker looked on as the brief life and death of that other personality, but I'd rather say it was but one aspect that was allowed to temporarily run wild similar to the personality changes people have when drunk.
To me the best case of being unconscious of an act is say when it was an accident (I cut the rope but did not know Finny was under the piano at the time and in fact believed the area under the piano was clear, they were not conscious in the sense of not in any sense aware of the pertinent fact).
Same, thinking about how to reply to this what first came to mind is one person being ordered to service an industrial machine who then crawls into it, and another being ordered to start it up by another supervisor which then precedes to kill the first guy unaware he's inside the machine.
That and many other aspects keep my from agreeing with Freud's "There are no accidents" assertion, something which I feel even ignores even simple health matters.
Someone living under the paranoid delusion that lizard people had taken over the Earth and that crime needed to be committed (and covered up) to fight the invasion, might have a pretty could defense in many jurisdictions, but they would be in some aspects highly aware of the crime, what makes it not criminal in this case is their motivation (they believe they are impelled by grim necessity to commit the crime to save themselves and the human race etc.) lacks criminal character (or is mitigated by their deluded sense of context or whatever).
That gives me Nuremberg Defence vibes. Not exactly the "only following orders" kind, but if one thinks a threat exists, one damn well back up that there is one. It wouldn't fly if the defendants claimed what they'd done in the war to the Jews, gypsy's and other people they'd slaughtered was ok given a genuine threat to Germany they believed they posed, even if no they recognize that believe was misplaced.
Similar is a woman who escapes an abusive husband and is able to cut all ties, yet then goes tracking the guy down and murders him. Unless she's able to prove he was deliberately acting to do something harmful that police had dismissed, like hiring a hitman to get her, then simply being too scared of him possibly doing something to her vaguely in the future isn't enough.
Back to the Nuremburg trials, it's illustrating that everyone scrambled to deflect responsibility for their actions instead of standing up and owning up to their acts while saying they were justified given the dire threats they were facing.
