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Description
Nobody's Child: A Tragedy, a Trial, and a History of the Insanity DefenseWhen a three year old child was found with a head wound and other injuries, it looked like an open and shut case of second degree murder. Psychologist and attorney Susan Vinocour agreed to evaluate the defendant, the child's mentally ill and impoverished grandmother, to determine whether she was competent to stand trial. Even if she had caused the child's death, had she realized at the time that her actions were wrong or was she legally "insane"? What
When a three-year-old child was found with a head wound and other injuries, it looked like an open-and-shut case of second-degree murder. Psychologist and attorney Susan Vinocour agreed to evaluate the defendant, the child's mentally ill and impoverished grandmother, to determine whether she was competent to stand trial. Even if she had caused the child's death, had she realized at the time that her actions were wrong or was she legally "insane"?
What followed was anything but an open-and-shut case. Nobody's Child traces the legal definition of "insanity" back to its inception in Victorian Britain nearly two hundred years ago, from when our understanding of the human mind was in its infancy, to today, when questions of race, class, and ability so often determine who is legally "insane" and who is criminally guilty. Vinocour explains how "competency" and "insanity" are creatures of a legal system, not of psychiatric reality, and how, in criminal law, the insanity defense has to often been a luxury of the rich and white.
Nobody's Child is a profoundly dignified portrait of injustice in America and a complex examination of the troubling intersection of mental health and the law. When prisons are now the largest institutions for the mentally ill, Vinocour demands that we reckon with our conceptions of "insanity" with clarity, empathy, and responsibility.
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 03/24/2020
ISBN: 9780393651928
Pages: 352
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.40d
Review Citations: Library Journal 02/01/2020 pg. 101
Publishers Weekly 01/27/2020
Kirkus Reviews 02/01/2020
Booklist 02/15/2020 pg. 10
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