Mental Competence Quotes
This is one of the earliest views that insane people should not be criminally punished for their acts. To a great extent, Constantine and his contemporaries believed that insanity was the work of the Devil or demons and therefore one should not sympathize with the condition either.
It is one of the tactics of Putin’s Russia. as it was with the Stalinist Era, to commit dissidents to mental institutions under the twisted logic that no one who was sane could possibly ge against such a beneficent government,
Although this is generally followed as a legal principle in America, states like Texas have executed felons who most other jurisdictions would see as Coke’s “mad man.”
There was a substantial movement to prevent mentally defective and people of low intelligence from being able to reproduce. Over 20 states, with the approval of the then Supreme Court performed forced state sterilizations. Of course the then definition of “degenerates” changed from state to state. A century later, American values changed so much that there is no state that would even consider involuntary sterilization and if they did, the Courts would hold it un-Constitutional.
