Abuse Defense - Other Responsibility Deflection Defenses

Other Responsibility Deflection Defenses

There are more than 40 distinct defenses and syndromes that have been employed by defense attorneys, all of which share the goal of deflecting responsibility for the crime away from the defendant. Some of these defenses seek to relate the defendant's behavior to previously existing medical conditions, such as antisocial personality disorder, fetal alcohol syndrome, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Other defenses seek to attribute the criminal act to the society in which the defendant lives rather than his or her own choices; the pornography defense asserts that the proliferation of pornography causes men to commit acts of sexual violence, and urban survival syndrome claims that violent conditions in a city or neighborhood may justify violent actions by a particular individual.