Research On Mental Patients’ Capacity Of Criminal Iiability Judgment

Since China is in a period of social transition, factors that cause mental illness are boosting constantly, which in turn makes China a country with high morbidity of mental disease. The statistics publicized by the Mental Health Center of Chinese Centers for Disease Control in2009show that there are over100million patients with various mental diseases, among whom holergasia patients are more than16million and70%of them have no access to therapy. Then it comes with the fact that increasingly high percent of crimes are committed by mental patients with more and more serious nature, which severely endangers the society and threatens people’s life and property.The provision of Criminal Law that the mental patient bears no criminal responsibility for his the serious crimes under the circumstance that he has no capacity of criminal liability embodies the protection of mental patients’ human rights. However, the sole general provision of no criminal liability is unable to satisfy the suspected mental patient cases handling in practice, and a lot of problems emerge thereafter. These problems are not only related to judicial impartiality and protection of those mental patients’ humane rights but related to the protection of the lawful rights of the nation, society and citizen.Article18of Criminal Law provides:if a mental patient causes harmful consequences at a time when he is unable to recognize or control his own conduct, upon verification and confirmation through legal procedure, he shall not bear criminal responsibility, his family members or guardian shall be ordered to keep him under strict watch and control and arrange for his medical treatment. When necessary, the government may compel him to receive medical treatment. Any person whose mental illness is of an intermittent nature shall bear criminal responsibility if he commits a crime when he is in a normal mental state. If a mental patient who has not completely lost the ability of recognizing or controlling his own conduct commits a crime, he shall bear criminal responsibility; however, he may be given a lighter or mitigated punishment. Mainly based on article18of Criminal Law, this thesis analyses the problems in judicial practice of the crimes committed by mental patients so as to seek a way to perfect the mental patients’criminal liability judgment system.In chapter1, I will analyse "mental illness" and "unable to recognize or control his own conduct" in order to ascertain the definition and scope of mental patients in criminal law and the mental patients’ capacity of criminal liability. In chapter2, I’m going to discuss the status quo of mental patients’ capacity of criminal liability judgment. According to the current situation handling mental patient actors in criminal cases and relevant statistics, I will figure out various problems in capacity of criminal liability judgment of involved mental patients and analyse the reasons to draw forth the following chapters. I will start in chapter3with "verification through legal procedure" to make analysis for the judicial procedure of mental patients’ capacity of criminal liability judgment and then proceed to research the question "how to define mental patients’capacity of criminal liability ". In the following chapters, I will conduct a research on the issues how to deal with the mental patients and victim relief in these circumstances and at last there comes some suggestions establishing supporting measures to help solve the problems concerning mental patients criminal judgment in judicial practice. I hope research in this thesis could facilitate the judicial authority to make scientific and lawful judgment on mental patients’ capacity of criminal liability.