The so-called Special Hospitals of England (Broadmoor, Rampton and Ashworth) provides a rather disconcerting fascination for myself. Why is that, I ask myself? Extremes have always fascinated me. The average is mundane, everyday, humdrum. The examples of the 'deranged' and 'estranged' inside these institutions are testament to the unusual extreme psychic conditions that humanity possesses. Within those Victorian facades, what living nightmares exist! And people said, during the dreadful heart-rending Soham murders, that Ian Huntley was in a Butlins-type place. Huntley could not fool the 'trickcyclists'. His behaviour would be monitored every second of every minute of every day of every week of... So if he truly suffers, and if he is a deeply disturbed individual, he will be suffering far worse torments than any 'sane' person can imagine. Therefore the perfectly understandable sentiment coming from the 'hang, draw and quarter him brigade', of wanting Huntley hanging by his fingers 24 hours a day, the said brigade should be happy as he is in a far worse place than one of Her Majesty's Prisons. You cannot run from your own mind, unless you pharmaceutically cosh it, but the side-effects from these anti-psychotic drugs are not pleasant at all. Also, once you are in such a place, their is no time limit for your release. You can be held indefinitely, until the day you die in many cases. I can't see Huntley, or, say, Peter Sutcliffe walking down the local high street in the near, or distant, future.
Thinking of the Yorkshire Ripper and the due legal process regarding such high-profile cases, he was found at his trial to be sane, and went off to Parkhurst in 1981, but subsequently the powers that be diagnosed him with schizophrenia and he was sent to Broadmoor in 1984. Sutcliffe had claimed he heard voices, voices from God. These voices told him to kill prostitutes - although his torrent of sexual blood lust led him on to kill women who were not working the streets of our Northern English industrial towns.
Alongside Sutcliffe and concerning legalities, there is another high-profile case which springs to mind, the necrophile Jeffrey Dahmer. Having read of the acts he perpetrated on his victims in Brian Masters' book "The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer", it is hard to believe the jury at his trial did not find him lacking in rational thought, i.e. insane. But, maybe (one of the reasons, at the least) due to the depth of emotion the case brought about, the jury found him guilty, i.e. sane. Now this man was attempting to make zombies out of his victims; he was in the progress of creating an altar in his apartment with the view that the completed said altar would endow him with an assortment of superpowers. Unusual acts and thoughts for a sane man, methinks!
As far as I can recall, in legal terms in US and UK law, a case of insanity is proven if the defendant did not know that the crime he was doing was wrong at the time he was acting out the crime
Thus both Sutcliffe and Dahmer were found legally sane. Yet most of the forensic psychiatric community involved in the above cases found them to be 'medically' insane. Obviously the minds of the above killers cannot be coupled together as though they were or are experiencing the same psychic phenomena. Purely as a result of idleness in not bothering to properly look into what I am wittering on about, I've discussed Dahmer and Sutcliffe as they seem to be prime examples of how the legal system and the medical community have come to loggerheads in cases such as the two briefly mentioned above.
I suppose an elementary reason is the medical community have an element of care in their nature, and the legal system is naturally a cold and reasoned part of our society. Both are merely outward manifestations of our inward psyche.
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