Personality disorders and criminal responsibility in Italy: forensic psychiatric considerations about the importance of going beyond a categorical view

In 2005 the Italian Supreme Court held that also persons suffering from \u201csevere personality disorders\u201d may enter a plea of non-responsibility if, at the time of an alleged crime, they were under such severe stress that they decompensated into a mental state during which they were unable to appreciate the nature, quality and consequences of their behavior or to conform their conduct to the requirements of the law. Since then, offenders with personality disorders have become a challenge for the Italian forensic psychiatric system, because criminal offenders have a high rate of personality disorders and the identification of the \u201csevere\u201d threshold is particularly hard in a jurisdiction which includes the volitional prong. The aim of this study is to determine how personality disorders are viewed in relation to criminal responsibility within the Italian criminal system, discussing the results in the light of the evidences from the international literature. We conducted a retrospective study of sentences of the Italian Supreme Court from January 1, 2006, to December 31, 2010, collected via a judicial database and we reviewed the articles published in English from 2000 to 2010 with the keywords \u201cpersonality disorder\u201d, \u201ccriminal responsibility\u201d, \u201cinsanity defense\u201d, \u201cvolitional/cognitive capacities\u201d. The results of the sentences study indicate that personality disorders have become very frequent in Italian insanity defense cases. The most frequently occurring are antisocial, borderline and non otherwise specified. The majority of these were associated with another Axis I disorder, in particular with substance abuse. According to the literature, the proof of a \u201cmental disease\u201d is necessary, but not sufficient, to establish an \u201cinsanity defense\u201d, because from a forensic psychiatric standpoint the necessary conditions whereby a mental disorder can take on the meaning of \u201cinsanity\u201d should be that it has caused, in the specific case, such \u201cpsychopathological functioning\u201d of the acting subject as to compromise his capacity for cognition and/or volition and that it was causally linked with the crime

Immaturit\ue0\u201d e psicopatologia: prospettive e limiti della valutazione psichiatrico-forense del minorenne autore di reato. Considerazioni su un caso peritale

In ambito giuspenalistico il termine di \u201cminore et\ue0\u201d assume una particolare importanza per quanto riguarda l\u2019accertamento dell\u2019imputabilit\ue0 del soggetto autore di reato. A fronte della presunzione di non imputabilit\ue0 per il minore degli anni 14, circa il minorenne con et\ue0 compresa tra i 14 ed i 18 anni, infatti, l\u2019esclusione dell\u2019imputabilit\ue0 pu\uf2 essere connessa non solo a condizioni propriamente patologiche (\u201cinfermit\ue0\u201d), ma anche a caratteristiche specifiche dell\u2019et\ue0 minore (c.d. \u201cimmaturit\ue0\u201d). Al fine di approfondire alcune delle complessit\ue0 sottese alle categorie concettuali delineate dal Diritto e di stimolare nuove riflessioni criteriologiche circa la valutazione della imputabilit\ue0 del minorenne autore di reato, viene presentato un caso peculiare in cui i confini tra normalit\ue0 e malattia, fisiologico e patologico, \u201cimmaturit\ue0\u201d ed \u201cinfermit\ue0\u201d sono quanto mai sottili ed intricati, soprattutto a fronte della presenza di un elemento ulteriore: l\u2019esclusivo legame intercorrente tra i due autori del reato, un fratello ancora infradiciottenne ed una sorella appena maggiorenne