plea insanity

I have read that the insanity defense is a hard one to win because the defendent has to prove that he/she was not aware that what they were doing was wrong at the time. They are also evaluated by psychiatrists from both the prosecution and the defense so it's hard to fake it. My state recently convicted a man who killed his step daughter and he did a very entertaining impersonation of an insane man...but the jury didn't buy it. I believe that people who truly are mentally ill belong in a psychiatric hospital and not in prison. They don't have an easy time of it in there and aren't likely to be declared "cured" and released.

No, but rather than go into the general prison population they should be in hospitals for the criminally insane. We need better institutions to house these people...not many people are successful at an insanity defense because it's very difficult to prove. You have to prove that the person did not know right from wrong. It's not good enough that the person knows it's wrong but is too insane to care--that's a sociopath, but it doesn't get you an insanity defense. You have to be somebody like Andrea Yates who was seriously hallucinating and murdered her children because the voices told her she had to in order to save them--she was psychotic; it wasn't her fault. It's not like you can just go, "Well, he's clearly crazy; he killed somebody." It's more complicated than that.