Book Alert / Emotions and Culpability

Emotions and Culpability -- How the Law is at Odds With Psychology, Jurors, and Itself by Norman J. Finkel and W. Gerrod Parrott, American Psychological Association '06, 312 pages, ISBN #1591474167. Author references, subject references, sources, unillustrated.

To determine criminal guilt under our legal system, the psychologist-authors write, an objective act and a subjective intent must both be present at the moment of the act. But the law acknowledges, albeit reluctantly, that "emotions can distort thinking, disable control, fuel motive, and drive action..."

And the way that the law seems to factor emotion into the determination of guilt, they say, "is out of touch with the way that jurors' 'commonsense justice' works and they way they judge culpability." Not only does this lead to inconsistent verdicts but "has serious implications for whether the law will be respected and obeyed."

As a device to enliven what could otherwise be a dry disquisition, the authors enlist the works of William Shakespeare, whom they call "that great psychologist of emotion," to help them deconstruct the widely-used Model Penal Code. "In this work," they explain, "we examine the Law's theories of emotions across some of the criminal law's crimes, defenses, and doctrines and demonstrate that these turn out to be psychological theories, for they advance explanatory claims about the emotional nature of our human nature."

The authors divide their narrative into three sections: "Defining the Ground and Providing Context for the Emotions," "Analyses and Comparisons of the Law's Emotions and Culpability Theories," and "Concluding Thoughts: Psychology's Informing Function." Both authors are professors of psychology at Georgetown University.