Charles Manson, dead at age 83

[Rev. Rye]

Legally, yeah, but still doesn't exclude the possibility that they may be mentally ill. Is psychopathy, for example, (or ASPD) not ever a mental illness? Is NPD not ever a mental illness?

What? I'm not excluding the possibility of mental illness. I'm talking about whether the mental illness was severe enough to deem a person innocent of the crime they commited.

Yes, the DSM-IV-TR I keep in my room (p. 701-6) says ASPD is, indeed, a mental illness. That said, ASPD is generally accepted to be impossible to treat since it's too hard to tell whether or not a patient is genuinely getting better or just playing their therapist like a fiddle, and it's too likely to be the latter. If one of the diagnoses is ASPD, culpability becomes a meaningless question. As far as psychoogy is concerned, it's impossible to be sure what they'd be like without it, and where the law is concerned, because they just wouldn't give a fuck either way.