Amnesia in Relation to Crime

Abstract

When a defence of insanity is put forward in answer to a criminal charge amnesia for the crime is not infrequently affirmed, in fact East (2) states that it is more often alleged than any other mental anomaly. The defence of amnesia is at times raised when there are no grounds for supposing that the prisoner is suffering from loss of memory, but there are undoubted cases where the crime, generally homicidal in character, has been committed during a disorder of consciousness or the memory of it subsequently has been lost. It is therefore of the greatest importance from a medico-legal point of view to distinguish between real and simulated amnesia. While amnesia may be simulated in cases where there is no mental disorder present, there are also instances where loss of memory is feigned by individuals in whom there are other reasons for regarding them as mentally abnormal. In this connection it must be realized that memory also is sometimes malingered; a prisoner who by reason of insanity accompanied by amnesia has escaped the responsibility for his crime may presently arrive at the conclusion that a persistence of his loss of memory will tend to keep him confined in an asylum, and therefore he asserts a remembrance of his crime, the story of which he is likely to have become familiar with at his trial or elsewhere. Not all such false memories, however, are definitely malingered. A patient may have heard the story of his crime so often that in the end he becomes convinced that he actually remembers it.