The spectacle continues. Lorenzo Mangione, whose trial has become a global morality play, now sees his legal team wrapping him in the shroud of psychiatric defence. The man who allegedly orchestrated a cyberattack that paralysed three states is to be painted not as a villain but as a victim of his own disordered mind. British legal experts watch with a mixture of fascination and horror, as if observing a Roman circus where the lions are now defending themselves with diagnoses.
This is the logical endpoint of a culture that has spent decades pathologising every deviation from the norm. Where once we had sinners, we now have patients. Where once we had evil, we now have syndromes. The Mangione case is not merely a legal curiosity; it is a mirror held up to a society that has lost the nerve to judge. The psychiatric defence, once a rare and carefully scrutinised plea, has become the refuge of those who can afford the right experts to narrate their fall from grace.
Consider the historical parallels. In the late Roman Empire, as civic virtue decayed, the courts became theatres of rhetoric rather than arenas of justice. Advocates would argue not about what a man did but about his status, his upbringing, his stars. The Mangione defence is cut from the same cloth: a boundless relativism that dissolves personal responsibility into a soup of determinism. If every crime is a symptom, then no one is guilty.
The British legal tradition, for all its flaws, has been more resistant to this trend. Our courts still cleave to the McNaughten rules, a stiff Victorian corset that insists on a clear distinction between knowing right from wrong and being unable to do so. Mangione’s lawyers would struggle to make such a case in London. But in America, where the therapy culture has colonised the law, the bar is lower. The question is not whether he knew what he was doing, but whether he felt like himself when he did it.
What does this mean for the broader culture? It means that we are training the public to see every miscreant as a broken machine rather than a moral agent. The result is not compassion but a sterile form of fatalism. If Mangione is mad, then he is also beyond reform or punishment: he becomes a problem to be managed, not a person to be held accountable. The psychiatric defence, in its modern, overused form, is an insult to both the genuinely ill and the genuinely responsible.
I say this as someone who believes in the complexity of human motivation. Of course mental state matters. But when the defence becomes a blanket, when every defendant can claim a diagnosis, the very concept of justice erodes. We end up with a system that treats the wealthy and connected differently from the poor, as Mangione’s high-priced experts will no doubt ensure. His lawyers will parade a parade of psychiatrists who will speak of trauma, chemical imbalances, and childhood neglect. They will present a story so full of mitigating circumstances that the original crime will seem almost inevitable, almost excusable.
But the crime itself was a deliberate, calculated act. It involved planning, resources, and a clear aim. To reduce it to a symptom of depression or anxiety is to trivialise the victims and the rule of law. The British legal experts watching this case should take note: this is where the path of therapeutic jurisprudence leads. It is a path that erases guilt and accountability, replacing them with a clinical vocabulary that sterilises moral outrage.
Mangione may well succeed with this defence. If he does, it will be a victory not for medicine but for a culture that has lost the stomach for calling evil what it is. The Romans had a phrase for this: corruptio optimi pessima, the corruption of the best is the worst. The psychiatric defence, once a tool of mercy, has become a tool of evasion. And we are all the poorer for it.
