Assessment and Reporting for Mental Condition Defences


intense fear caused externally, as in battle, will amount to non-insane automatism. However, the presence of personality disorder, for example, ‘emotionally unstable personality disorder’, which renders the person more likely to dissociate will, if they did dissociate at the time of commission of the actus, result in a finding of ‘insane automatism’. If the defendant was both more vulnerable to dissociation that the ordinary person and was subjected to an external blow, mental or physical, then it may be open to argument as to how the causal balance should be struck medically, and interpreted legally.


Notably, the defence of automatism is not available to a defendant whose actions were ‘involuntary’ by virtue of intoxication at the material time (although a different defence may, very rarely apply, in terms of the defendant having been incapable of forming the specific intent for the offence, see below).


Clinical issues


Te issue relates to the likely mental state of the defendant at the time of the offence and, akin to assessment for insanity, will require both retrospective reconstruction of the defendant’s mental state at the time and careful dissection of both that state and its cause. Dependent upon the likely disorder present, assessment may require medical expertise going beyond psychiatry, including neurology or neuropsychiatry.


Tere may also be a need for very specific and expert neurological expertise, in relation, for example, to consideration of epilepsy or sleep disorder. Such assessment will have to consider:


• Is the neurological disorder confirmed and pre-existing? • Was the act in some way characteristic of that disorder? • Was there any obvious motive, planning or premeditation? • Was there any evidence of ordinary consciousness at the time?


In regard to any possible form of automatism, be it neurological or functional in origin, it will be necessary to consider:


• Was the action uncharacteristic of the defendant’s ordinary characteristic behaviour? • Is there evidence of motive? • Was the offence concealed?


Assessment of functional automatism is particularly difficult and problematic.


Most commonly, the mental condition at issue is that of ‘dissociation’, which is extremely difficult to diagnose with confidence, and to defend in legal proceedings. A necessary, but in no way sufficient, condition for there to have been dissociation at the time of the actus is amnesia for the act. But what is also required is evidence per se that the defendant did dissociate at the time, in that amnesia can simply be ‘psychogenic amnesia’; that is, amnesia by way of ‘dissociation away from memories laid down’, rather than amnesia arising because the memories were not laid down, because the defendant was dissociated at the time. (see Chapter 5)


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