Book Launch Judging Insanity, Punishing Difference
Dr Chloé Deambrogio, Junior Research Fellow in Law at Merton College, will be in discussion with Alan Norrie, Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Warwick, and Dennis Patterson, Professor of Legal Philosophy at the University of Surrey.
The event will be chaired by the Warden of Merton College, Professor Jennifer Payne, and will be followed by a drinks reception.
Notes & Changes
Admission free, no booking required
Venue: Mure Room, Merton College
In Judging Insanity, Punishing Difference, Chloé Deambrogio explores how developments in the field of forensic psychiatry shaped American courts' assessments of defendants' mental health and criminal responsibility over the course of the twentieth century. During this period, new psychiatric notions of the mind and its readability, legal doctrines of insanity and diminished culpability, and cultural stereotypes about race and gender shaped the ways in which legal professionals, mental health experts, and lay witnesses approached mental disability evidence, especially in cases carrying the death penalty.
Using Texas as a case study, Deambrogio examines how these medical, legal, and cultural trends shaped psycho-legal debates in state criminal courts, while shedding light on the ways in which experts and lay actors' interpretations of "pathological" mental states influenced trial verdicts in capital cases. She shows that despite mounting pressures from advocates of the "rehabilitative penology," Texas courts maintained a punitive approach towards defendants allegedly affected by severe mental disabilities, while allowing for moralized views about personalities, habits, and lifestyle to influence psycho-legal assessments, in potentially prejudicial ways.
Chloé Deambrogio is a Junior Research Fellow in Law at Merton College, Oxford. Her research sits at the intersection of critical legal theory, death penalty scholarship, mental disability law, and race and gender studies.
Attached are two promotional flyers for the book which include two discount codes (one for UK purchases and one for purchases done on Stanford University Press's website).
Stanford University Press - Judging Insanity, Punishing Difference.pdf
