Introduction

The legal defenses discussed in this chapter do not involve questions of fact that negate a criminal accusation; rather, they involve questions of law that stand in the way of finding criminal responsibility or applying a criminal sanction to a person charged with a crime. Legal systems differ as to how they characterize these factors. The differences in characterization reflect the ways that families of legal systems conceptualize criminal responsibility. The Germanic legal systems are the most doctrinally rigid, as are positivistic one, such as those deriving from what is commonly referred to as the French-civilist system. The common law family is more pragmatic.

As a consequence of the families of legal systems approaching criminal responsibility with different conceptualizations, the same factors bearing on criminal responsibility or exoneration are defined differently. For example, sanity may be deemed a foundational condition for criminal responsibility, whereas insanity may be deemed an exonerating factor, a legal excuse, or a legal defense.

These factors relate both to subjective conditions pertaining to the individual actor or to objective conditions relating to the circumstances of the purported criminal act. The subjective and objective conditions may overlap.