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The purpose of this paper is to analyse how novel homicide defences predicated on contemporary neuroscience align with legal insanity.

Doctrinal analysis, systematic investigation of relevant statutes and cases, was used to elucidate how the law of insanity is evolving. Cases represent the first recorded instance of a particular neuroscientific defence. US appellate cases were categorised according to the mechanism of action of neurotransmitter relied upon in court. A case study approach was also used to provide a contextualised understanding of the case outcome in depth.

Findings broadly depict how the employment of expert testimony runs parallel with our contemporary understanding of key neurotransmitters and their function in human behaviour. Generally, medico-legal evidence concerning neuromodulating agents and violent behaviour was inconclusive. However, the outcome of defence strategy may depend on the underlying neurotransmitter involved.

This study shows that as more discoveries are made about the neurobiological underpinnings of human behaviour; this new knowledge will continue to seep into the US court system as innovative defence strategies with varying success. Medical and legal practitioners may gauge the success of a defence depending on the neuromodulating agent.

Many scholars have focused on the role of neuroimaging as neuroscientific evidence and how it is used is shaping US criminal jurisprudence. To the best of the author’s knowledge, no study has incorporated the true origin of neuroscientific evidence as being underpinned by the understanding of neurotransmitters.

Murder is overwhelmingly a male affair (UNODC Global Study on Homicide, 2019). So, when women kill, their crimes gain a lot of attention and even more hysteria in both courts and media. This chapter will analyse the cases of Sally Challen, Belinda van Krevel and Maxine Carr to show that portrayals of women who are involved in killing exist on a continuum, from abused victims to those simply ‘born evil’ to the incomprehension of those whose crimes render them outside society altogether; or in simple terms, from sad, to bad, to mad. In all cases, the agency of the women is presented as incomplete or impossible, indicating our inability in heteropatriarchy to acknowledge that women are as capable as men of exhibiting the full spectrum of human behaviour. Denying agency, particularly to violent women, allows Western societies to avoid having to face and thus, attempt to understand, the female capacity for aggression.

This introductory chapter will provide the context for the collection, introducing the topic(s) of sex, consent, the law and the wider ongoing debates concerning the use of consensual ‘rough’ sex and/or bondage, discipline, sadism and/or masochism as a defence in homicide cases. An overview of the book will also be provided.

Knight's Industrial Law Reports goes into a new style and format as Managerial Law This issue of KILR is restyled Managerial Law and it now appears on a continuous updating basis rather than as a monthly routine affair.

Many violent and sexual offenders are mentally disordered or will develop mental disorders while serving their sentence. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 introduced major changes to the sentencing of 'dangerous offenders'. The disposal given to these offenders has implications for subsequent clinical management in secure mental health units, prison and, ultimately, in the community, particularly when it is an indeterminate sentence. This paper argues that the Act also has implications for psychiatric evidence submitted to the courts in such cases. The changes appear to carry significant resource implications too, especially for community forensic psychiatry.

THE wheels of the warring world continue to turn with as yet no obviously decisive result. In no place, however, does normal life prevail, however much it may appear to do so. We hear of unoccupied men and women, but rarely meet them; most able‐bodied folk have their national employment, as well as their vocation, today, and the whole race is better for it. Savage and critical as the scene is our people have kept physical and mental health in an unprecedented measure. So far as libraries are concerned, we live in times really remarkable, because the reading of books has been proved to be necessary to the well‐being of the community in the most strenuous days. A glance at the average library report will give evidence enough, and we are receiving more reports of late than in the first and second year of war. One such report, from Worthing, is a typewritten document showing that 55 per cent. of the population are actually enrolled, and that this town of less than sixty thousand people borrowed in 1941–2 little less than 800,000 volumes, a turnover of over twelve per head. We do not know that this is unique, but it must be regarded as the tale of a service which reaches everybody, because most books taken out of a library are read by several members of the household into which they go. While this is the tale of a seaside “neutral” area, from which, however, visitors are barred during “the invasion season,” in the more dangerous areas with their greatly reduced populations issues are returning to pre‐war levels. Even where this is not so, it is found that head for head more books are given out by public librarians than ever before. When we add to their work that of the subscription libraries, a great activity of which we have no figures, the claim that the English are becoming a literate nation seems to have some substance. Anyway, it reads words in enormous quantity.

In a series of high-profile cases, defendants accused of murdering women have tried to mitigate their murder charge on the basis that the killing was not intentional but rather was an accidental outcome of consensual ‘rough sex’. Activists, academics, and the popular press have presented this as a form of victim blaming and calls have been made to ban the so called ‘rough sex defence’. This has led to a promise from the government to include such a prohibition in the Domestic Abuse Bill which is currently making its way through Parliament. In this chapter the overarching problems around trying to define ‘rough sex’ in a sufficiently clear manner to make for an effective law will be explored. This will include a discussion of the inherent physical riskiness and harm of sexual intercourse and associated activities and how this would fit with the current offences against the person legal architecture. It will also consider how the court has struggled to deal with other areas of potentially consensual personal interaction which can lead to harm such as the case law on ‘horseplay’. Finally, it will argue that trying to define ‘rough sex’ within the confines of domestic abuse legislation may limit the scope and effectiveness of the measures. The proposals will also be placed in the context of previous unsuccessful attempts to deal with gendered issues in criminal law offences such as limits on the use of sexual history evidence and the use of sexual infidelity in ‘loss of control’ cases. The chapter will conclude by considering whether a ‘rough sex’ defence ban might meet a similar fate.