!!!
I don't know the facts of the case, but from the snippet above it seems like Harley argued that his client had a break from epistemic access to "his" actions: "[He] did not know what he was doing." Perhaps it would have been more Kahnstructive to argue that the man who committed the crime did know what "he" was doing, but that the man on trial, because of his "diseased mind," is constitutively different from the murderer, and hence not the same "he" as the murderer. So, it's not that his client was psychologically closed off to his actions during the crime, rather, because of temporary physiological changes, his client is not that guy! Almost impossible to prove, but more interesting, no?
Abstract: Can one’s identity be divorced from one’s actions? In this paper, I stop at the intersection of literature and law to synthesize two sketches: one from the world of fiction; the other from the world of fact. The paper proceeds in four sections. In section one, I examine Sophocles’
Ajax, and discuss a character who equates his identity with his actions, even though he is clearly not “himself” when performing them. I consider what I call the 'Ajax Case,' namely, the causal chain of events that show the eponymous hero’s mind falling victim to the intrusive manipulations of the goddess Athena, and his subsequent decision to suicide. For Ajax there is no separating identity from actions, even if mitigated by a deity. I suggest that if Ajax would have understood the identity-action relationship a little differently, he might have reasoned that his actions were committed
non compos mentis; thus severing his identity from his humiliation and releasing him from suicidal shame. In section two, I consider the Yates Case. Andrea P. Yates, a mother whose personal identity was deemed by a U.S. court as sufficiently separate from her act of filicide, was found not guilty of drowning her five children by reason of insanity; thus helping her escape the full punishment of the law. In section three, I show how both the Ajax and Yates cases involve the “McNaughton Rule,” i.e., the insanity defense. Although extremely difficult to establish, the rule’s most salient point is the presumption of sanity, unless it can be shown that at the time of committing a crime, the accused was laboring under such a defect of reason as not to be the agent of her actions. Consequently, I highlight two disparate theories of identity: John Locke’s view of psychological continuity, and Bernard Williams’ bodily criterion or spatiotemporal view. Finally, in section four, I argue that while Locke and Williams have antithetical views on personal identity, they nevertheless both involve the notions of persistence and stability. Therefore, while the Ajax and Yates cases have contentious outcomes, because the continuity between their identities and actions appear broken, their identities and actions can be divorced and bifurcated.