Session 9: Madness and Law
2nd Global Conference
Monday 14th September – Thursday 17th September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
Mental Health and Law in India
Vikash Kumar
Chanakya National Law University, Patna, India
India is a country where 2.13% of the total population is disabled and marginalized; and where the terms like Insanity, Unsoundness of Mind, Mentally Challenged, Impairment, Mental disability etc are inter-changeably used to refer to persons with mental health issues. In this backdrop it becomes very difficult for the state to protect and affirm the rights and entitlements of persons with psychiatric problems through government policies and laws. The vulnerability of such persons increases substantially when such government policies and laws are themselves flawed. However the mental health issues are now gaining ground in the disability discourse. The authors in this paper seek to review and draw spotlight on the inadequacies of the various legislations and government policies governing the civil, criminal and political rights of persons with mental illness along with a critical analysis of “The Mental Health Act,1987” and “Persons With Disabilities Act,1996” which are special laws made by the Indian Parliament in pursuance to the United Nations convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CPRD) which mandates to all signatory countries that the substantive rights and principles of the convention should reflect upon the laws of the signatory country. The authors in this paper also make an attempt to outline and suggest certain reforms in the field of substantive, procedural, evidentiary aspects of law and in the treatment and rehabilitation of persons with mental illness.
Instrumentalisation of the concept of insanity within the boundaries of legal institution through an episode of Boston Legal
Ji yun Park
University of Paris 8, Paris, France
A woman asks a lawyer to advise her as to the legal steps she has to take to kill a man and to be found “not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.” The man she is planning to execute is her daughter’s ex-fiance who killed her and was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. (Boston Legal, 2007) Fiction, as a genre, provides secure boundaries within which one can explore and play with situations that would be improbable in the “real” world. It is a site where the public’s images of the world are fabricated and exploited. Television series are particularly sensitive to the evolution of the public’s perceptions of and sensibilities about the world: television, as a mass medium, interacts with the audiences on a massive scale because of an easy accessibility to it; television series, as a format, exploits repetitive and regular structures to hold and play with the audiences’ interest. I chose Boston Legal as a work material because it manipulates these characteristics of television series in an eccentric style so as to carry representations of legal issues (madness for instance) to extreme shapes.
The above-decribed scene from Boston Legal deals with a legal issue which audiences of legal movies or television series are familiar with: the power of temporary insanity defense used in obtaining a “not-guilty” verdict for the accused. Situations represented traditionally on screens are cases defended after the crime is committed by highly skilled lawyers who by mobilizing their charisma, art of discourse and of performance fabricate madness and induce the jury to take the construction for real. By featuring a future murderer planning to commit revenge crime within the boundaries of law, Boston Legal pushes the issue to its extreme form. Through an analysis of this case as represented in this episode from a narrative and ideological perspective, this paper proposes to examine the following questions : the mechanim by which legal institution controls the uncontrollable by naming (“temporary insanity”) the unamable and the limitations of this system that create situations where citizens exploit those very limitations of legal institution to plan their crime in advance and achieve justice as they conceive it within the boundaries of law.
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