Abstract

For long it’s been argued that derangement in mental faculties causes one to lose rationality, however its relationship with criminality, and the treatment of same in legal field is called into question multiple times. Its cannot be pointed out with certainty that if one is a suffering from mental illness, the result action of his behaviour is only crime. There are two sides to this paradox, primarily that in most cases mentally ill are victims and secondly that in some extreme of cases it might lead to creation loss of ability to judge between good and bad causing one’s personality to erode over time and commit actions that seen to them to be mostly moral and legal but aren’t in the contrary. With this given the question is how law treats the offenders, while in most cases insanity refers to legal insanity and law doesn’t merge with needlessly curtailing liberty of an individual just because they don’t fall within the mental ability of sanity. Its also pertinent to note that legal insanity is defined very narrowly and doesn’t include insanity in general but that which exists at the time of commission of offense, not before or after. The article seeks to explore the status and draw meaningful conclusion from the it. It checks through the legal provisions and tries to understand the mental status of a person and show the duality of the situation to present the problem to the society.

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