What if a criminal lost their memories?

[Aix]

If a criminal lost their memories after committing a crime, should they still face legal consequences? Would it be right to punish a person with no recollection of doing wrong? Say a man commits a murder, but then loses all his memories in some other accidents and proceeds to live life as he did before the crime. Or what if they basically become a new person?

 

What if the criminal purposefully erased their own memories? Of course, this isn't something the world has to deal with now, but in the future it could be likely.

[Wildflame]

Sounds like a decent plot for a story.

[Thar]

Is it possible to not show any signs of amnesia, like at all? Cause usually when people lose their memories, certain things trigger them.

[Ryusei the Morning Star]

Like you mean self electroshock into forgetting?

[Aix]

Is it possible to not show any signs of amnesia, like at all? Cause usually when people lose their memories, certain things trigger them.

In the case of this thought experiment, let's say there isn't.

 

Like you mean self electroshock into forgetting?

I mean this as a thought experiment and was mainly thinking about in the future where memory manipulation could be possible for the second question.

[Ryusei the Morning Star]

In the case of this thought experiment, let's say there isn't.

 

I mean this as a thought experiment and was mainly thinking about in the future where memory manipulation could be possible for the second question.

Well I am of the opinion the death penalty as we have it at the moment itself need to be scrapped and ideally gone. If repent or in this case a new identity is shown then yes, the person should be freed and not executed

[Icy]

A lot of types of psychosis don't leave much memories behind. Its normal to have to see these things in court, but you still did the crime. So the question doesn't become "would they be liable post memory loss", it would become "how can we prove the person with the memory loss would not have committed the crime outside this fugue-state" (I hope I'm using that word right).

 

Traditionally a person with amnesia will still get full or partial sentence regardless. 

As for the purposeful loss, if it can be proven then your question answers itself.

 

(Watch Polaris come in here and tell me "always by the book Icy" again).

[Not-so-Radiant Arin]

Murder is still murder. People shouldn't get free passes just because they can't remember what they did. Who is to say that even with their memory loss that they won't commit murder again?

[~ P O L A R I S ~]

This actually happens fairly frequently, particularly with users of psychotic drugs. If their condition or decisions were such that they could commit another crime then lose their memory again, then they would need to be somehow institutionalized, whether in rehab, a mental hospital, or prison depending on the circumstances. 

 

I don't believe that anyone's truly in their right mind when they kill someone, but it has to be taken into consideration how prone a person would be to losing their mind again in order to protect others from being victimized in the future. 

[Βyakuya]

This exactly happened in Death Note...sort of. Light abandoned ownership of his Death Note in order to rid his memories while being willfully incarcerated, thus having L pinning suspicion on "innocent" Light and thye both both work together to find the current Kira. Even innocent Light with no memories acknowledges the possibility that he did have memories of Kira once, while L still holds his suspicions on Light the whole time with the handcuffs trick.

 

Regardless, murder is murder, and if anyone is going to lose their memories, most of the time it's intentional with any kind of medium. They'll always leave their tracks behind, and likely will be punished at the best extent for them. Worst case scenario would be perjured testimony, but there's no going back from trying to hide from a vile scheme someone committed, evne from themselves.

[Agro]

If it were possible to erase memories, it'd likely also be possible to rewrite them.

 

The question rises as to whether that is ethical.

 

Someone should still serve time, however. There's a reason you can get paroled for good behavior. It shows you've changed.

[T. Sankara]

This is some Dangan Ronpa shit.  I'd love to be on jury for a case like this.  So much learning potential.

[Yosuke-kun]

This is actually a thing someone did for their Crim essay in my class, so I'm gonna go with a lot of what they said.

 

First; there are a LOT of variables to consider here. What the crime was, how the crime was committed, any past crimes committed, and the criminals profile are only a few. For example, if the criminal, say murdered somebody then by some means gave themselves amnesia, then the man would still be sentenced as his crime was premeditated in such a way as to avoid crime. The man might not have remembered doing what he did, but he still committed the crime. There's also the possibility that the criminal could have been smart enough to plan out where he might go accurately enough so that he could walk into a trigger and regain his memories. While it's unlikely, it's not impossible.

 

The criminals personality prior to his memory loss, like I stated earlier, is also a very important detail. So for example, say that the criminal is a complete psychopath who guiltlessly murders and rapes children, then decides to stuff them and keep them as human dolls. If this man were to lose his memories, he might not remember committing these horrible crimes, but his personality still makes him too unsafe for him to be simply released back into regular society. In a case like this however it's more likely that said criminal would be sent to an asylum or a psych ward in he hopes that he might be re-educated before he recovers his memories. 

 

That option is actually the safest option in most cases. Criminals who have been afflicted with amnesia have been known become more dangerous as a result of the amnesia in fact. Some of them develop a split personality disorder from it as well. This can happen if treatment goes wrong, or if the memories start to come back but are repressed by the criminal for whatever reason. One criminal suffering from this reported seeing himself in his room with him, and that he told himself to kill the doctors the next morning. So it can get pretty bad if not treated properly. The safest option is always to have the criminal treated in an asylum because a "rehabilitated murderer" suffering from his repressed memories of his murders and his desires to kill can be infinitely more dangerous than he would have been normally.

 

So if it's a crime that doesn't involve murder, kidnapping, rape, or anything that would endanger the safety of the public should he be released, say robbery perhaps then the criminal may have a chance to be released into society free of his crimes, but if it was something like murder or rape (especially if it were rape) he would likely be placed into an asylum because it would mean that he was probably suffering from a mental disorder prior to his amnesia. It goes without saying though that cases like this are rare to say the least, so things like this are most likely handled with a lot more care than I made it sound. The crime committed does play a huge role however, as well as the criminals psych profile and past personality.