The spectacle of Luigi Mangione’s lawyers invoking a psychiatric defence in his state murder trial is a grim echo of intellectual fashions that reduce human agency to a clinical condition. Our legal establishment, ever eager to ape transatlantic trends, watches with bated breath. But let us be honest: this is not justice.
It is a sophisticated abdication of moral responsibility. Mangione, accused of a cold-blooded killing, now claims his mind was a malfunctioning machine. The jury is asked to consider not his deeds but his dopamine levels.
This is the jurisprudence of a decadent age, where every villain becomes a victim of his own biology. I do not deny that mental illness exists, but to transform every atrocity into a symptom is to cheapen both the law and the human condition. The Victorians understood that free will, however constrained, must bear the weight of its choices.
We would do well to remember that before we bury justice under a pile of psychiatric reports.
