Insanity defense reform and the sign of abolition: re-visiting montana's experience

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Volumn 10, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 191-211

  Arrigo, Bruce A ^a  

^a Institute of Psychology Law and Public Policy   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 53249084199     PISSN: 09528059     EISSN: 15728722     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF01101503     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. H.J. Steadman et al., Before and After Hinckley: Evaluating Insanity Defense Reform (New York: Guilford, 1993), 11-31.
2. Supra n.1, at 2, 35-39; C. Mayer, "Insanity Defense Reforms: Pre- and Post-Hinckley", Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Law and Society Association (Washington, D.C., June 8-12, 1987), 28.
3. J.N. Boyce and D.S. Jackson, "Is the System Guilty", Time (July, 5, 1982), 26;
4. L. Callahan, C. Mayer and H.J. Steadman, "Insanity Defense Reform in the United States -Post Hinckley", Mental and Physical Disability Law Reporter 11/1 (1987), 54-59.
5. Act to Abolish the Defense of Mental Disease or Defect in Criminal Actions and to Provide an Alternative Sentencing Procedure 1979, s.46 (14-313) (hereafter Reform Act). In the United States, both Utah in 1982 and Idaho in 1983 abolished the insanity defense. For some general information on the Utah experiment see P. Heinbecker, "Two Years' Experience Under Utah's mens rea insanity law", Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law
6. 14/2 (1986), 185-191.
7. Supra n. 1, at 125-137.
8. J.M. Bender, "After Abolition: The Present State of the Insanity Defense in Montana", Montana Law Review 45 (1984), 133-150.
9. Supra n.1, at 136.
10. D. Cornell, Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference (New York: Routledge, 1993).
11. P, Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990).
12. D. Milovanovic, Postmodern Law and Disorder: Psychoanalytic Semiotics, Chaos, and Juridic Exegeses (Liverpool, UK: Deborah Charles Publications, 1992).
13. B. Arrigo, The Contours of Psychiatric Justice: A Postmodern Critique of Mental Illness, Criminal Insanity, and the Law (New York: Garland, 1996).
14. Model Penal Code, 1962 s.4.01.74.
15. Supra n.6, at 142.
16. Supra n.1, at 124.
17. Supra n.1, at 124-129.
18. Supra n.1, at 126.
19. See especially, R. Kevelson, The Law as a System of Signs (New York: Plenum Press, 1988), 3
20. ; R. Kevelson, Charles S. Pence's Method of Methods (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1994).
21. C.S. Peirce, The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings, J Buchler, ed., (London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1956), 98-119.
22. Supra n. 18, at 99,275.
23. Supra n.10, at 144.
24. R. Corrington, An Introduction to C.S. Peine (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1993), 133.
25. Supra n.10, at 144.
26. For a lucid and integrated application of Greimas' semiotic square concept applied to law see, B. Jackson, Semiotics and Legal Theory (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 75-110, 117;
27. B. Jackson, Law, Fact and Narrative Coherence (Merseyside, UK: Deborah Charles Publications, 1988), 137.
28. Supra n.1, at 121.
29. For example, the relationship between "abolition" and "non-insanity defense" could be defined as guilty-but-mentally-ill or GBMI; between "non-abolition" and "abolition" as undetermined criminal culpability, between "non-abolition" and "non-insanity defense" as suspicion of guilt.
30. Supra n.11, at 147-94.
31. Supra n.1. at 136.
32. F. Jameson, "Foreword", in On Meaning, ed. A. Greimas (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xv.
33. Supra n.28, at xvii-xxii.
34. J. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trld. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977).
35. M. Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 1-2;
36. D. Caudill, Lacan and the Subject of Law: Toward a Psychoanalytic Critical Legal Theory (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997), 4-22.
37. E. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971).
38. J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1981), 131-139.
39. Sufran. 33, at 211,218.
40. Supra n.33, at 139; see also, P. Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 76.
41. Supra n. 33, at 218; M. Borch-Jacobsen Lacan: The Absolute Master (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 169-196.
42. D. Milovanovic, "Re-thinking Subjectivity in Law and Ideology: A Semiotic Perspective", Journal of Human Justice 4/1 (1992), 31-53, at 48.
43. For Lacan, the combinatoiy effects of these Three Orders are depicted in his famous Schema L and his Graphs of Desire. Both represent Lacan's quadripartite subject. Supra n.30, at 193-194, 303-316. In the quadrilateral subject we have a more robust delineation of the speaking-being mobilizing the psychic apparatus when confronted with its own lack. For a brief, though accessible, overview of the Three Orders see Caudill, supra n.31, at 8-9, 102-KB.
44. In Lacanian psychoanalytic semiotics, a signifier represents the subject for another signifier, which represents the subject for another signifier, etc, (an infinite regress). See supra n.30, at 74. For Lacan, the search for completeness, consistency, and precision, were illusory because they dismissed the integral role of the person through whom signifiers were embodied with meaning and desire. See J. Lacan, Feminine Sexuality (New York: W.W. Norton and Pantheon Books, 1985), 143-147.
45. Supra n. 37, at 44-51.
46. Supra n. 30, at 166.
47. Supra n 30, at 112-132.
48. R. Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disorder", in Fundamentals of Language, ed. R. Jakobson and M. Halle (Paris: Mouton, 1971), 69-96.
49. Law, Fact, and Narrative Coherence, supra n. 23, at 58, 110-111,
50. Supra n. 10, at 120; D. Milovanovic, A Primer in the Sociology of Law (Albany, NY: Harrow & Heston, 1994, 2nd ed.), 163.
51. K. Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 110.
52. C. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983), 104-143.
53. Supra n. 11, at 175-202.