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"n4 Speaking of the recent American Psychiatric Association Statement on the
Insanity Defense, Professor Phillip E. Johnson notes:
The APA has not adopted the extreme views of Thomas Szasz, but it has definitely
repudiated the ideology of Karl Menninger. The psychiatrists no longer want
the criminal law to change to conform to deterministic psychiatric concepts;
instead, they regard it as vital to the integrity of their own discipline that
"legal or moral constructs such as free will" be understood as outside the
domain of psychiatry. They emphatically affirm that most people, including those
with sociopathic personality disorders, should be held accountable for what they
do. They are not washing their hands of the legal problems, and they believe
that the law still needs them, but they understand that legal and moral
decisions are ultimately to be made by citizens, not experts. I regard this
newly found modesty as evidence of the profession's increasing maturity, not as
a sign of its failure.
Johnson, Book Review, 50 U.Chi.L.Rev. 1534, 1548 (1983) (reviewing N. Morris,
Madness and the Criminal Law (1982))."
As cited in: UNITED STATES v. LYONS, No. 82-3429, UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT, 731 F.2d 243; 1984 U.S. App. LEXIS 23486; 15 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. (Callaghan) 859, April 16, 1984>
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