Protecting the Mentally Disturbed Defendant Against Himself

Extract

A Particular problem for English criminal procedure is the defendant on a murder charge who is (to put it crudely) so mad that he believes that he is sane—and instead of running the obvious defences of insanity or diminished responsibility, runs some other defence that seems plausible to him but no one else. In Weekes [1999] 2 Cr.App.R. 520 the Court of Appeal departed from its earlier case law on the subject and pointed the law in what this commentator feels to be a sounder direction.