Blurred Lines of Intoxication and Insanity: An Examination of the Treatment at Law of Accused Persons Found to Have Committed Criminal Acts While in States of Substance-Associated Psychosis, Where Intoxication Was Voluntary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
R. v. Bouchard-Lebrun is a landmark case. In it, the Supreme Court of Canada brings an end to decades-old debate on the question of whether an accused person is exempt from criminal liability for acts committed in a state of substance-induced psychosis. The court ruled that individuals in these circumstances do not qualify for the defence of not-criminally-responsible-by-reason-of-mental-disorder if the psychosis resulted exclusively from voluntary substance use. However, the court left unanswered the difficult question of whether accused persons with co-occurrence and contributing substance use and mental disorder (or some other form of neurobiological vulnerability) are subject to criminal liability to the same extent. Included in this article is an overview of the psychiatric literature on substance-associated psychosis and an examination of the law governing the attribution of criminal responsibility in such cases, with particular consideration given to the defences of NCRMD and intoxication. What emerges is the view that, notwithstanding the clarification offered by the Court in R. v. Bouchard-Lebrun, considerable uncertainty remains in the law itself, and in relation to the quality of the medical evidence on which assessments of criminal liability must now be made. It appears that this is especially so in cases of co-occurring and co-contributing substance use and mental disorder, where the evidentiary lines between intoxication and insanity are blurred and the moral blameworthiness of an accused incapable of clear definition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".