Amnesia for criminal offences

Abstract

SynopsisNearly 10% of a sample of men charged with a variety of offences claimed amnesia for their offence. The amnesia occurred only among those who had committed violence and was most frequent following homicide. All the amnesics had a psychiatric disorder, four having a primary depressive illness and the remainder being almost equally divided between schizophrenia and alcohol abuse. None of the amnesias had any legal implications. The circumstances of the offences suggested a variety of mechanisms to account for the amnesia, including repression, dissociation and alcoholic black-outs. Psychological defence mechanisms were probably of some importance, even when alcohol was an important factor.

Amnesia for criminal offences: a study of life sentence prisoners

“…Bradford and Smith, (1979) examined 30 men charged with homicide assessed at the Department of Forensic Psychiatry at the Royal Ottowa Hospital, of whom 60% claimed amnesia. Taylor and Kopelman (1984) studied 203 men on remand in the hospital wing of HMP Brixton (which took all those on remand for homicide at that time), of whom 26% of those charged with homicide claimed amnesia. Parwatiker, Holcomb and Meninger (1985) examined 105 men remanded for homicide at the Missouri Maximum-Security Unit of whom 22% claimed amnesia.…”

“…All these samples had their particular biases, including small sample size (Bradford and Smith, 1979;O'Connell, 1960), amnesia rates based on unconvicted subjects (Parwatiker et al, 1985;Bradford and Smith, 1979;Taylor and Kopelman, 1984), and samples with high rates of psychiatric morbidity (Hopwood and Snell, 1933;Bradford and Smith, 1979). Moreover, only the Hopwood and Snell (1933) study contained any follow-up data.…”

Intoxication and legal defences

“…It is also essential to thoroughly tease out the history of alcohol and substance misuse. Clinical assessment may be complicated by amnesia, which is common in serious offences but is not per se a defence in criminal proceedings (Taylor & Kopelman, 1984). The principal problem when assessing the state of intoxication characterising an offender who has committed a criminal act is that many offenders lack one of the key premises for responsibility for a criminal act, namely mens rea.…”

The Popular Policeman and Other Cases : Psychological Perspectives on Legal Evidence

“…However, claims of amnesia among 24 to 47 percent of convicted murderers, as reported by various authors (cf. Taylor & Kopelman, 1984), cannot possibly be called rare.…”