This episode of The Apex and the Abyss contains graphic descriptions, audio, and language that may be unsettling to some individuals.

Listener discretion is advised.

Some of you may not know this, but I work for a company that does background checks.

I can't divulge into that too much, but for the last seven years I have been reading court documents from top to bottom.

In those seven years, I have seen every end to a case imaginable.

Dismissed, adjudication withheld, guilty, and not guilty.

Just to name a few dispositions, there are many more.

But within those years, I'm reviewing somewhere around 100,000 cases, I have never once seen an

individual found not guilty by reason of insanity. This is an option within the programs we use

to input the information found in the court documents,

but never once have I selected it.

This got me thinking, how common is it in the United States for a person to use an insanity defense,

and it actually works? Or better yet, when is the person truly insane?

And what is the criteria for that?

Well, first, to put it in the simplest terms,

an insanity defense is a defense in a criminal trial,

wherein a defendant admits to a crime that they committed.

But the defendant lacks the culpability due to the fact that they have a mental illness.

According to the bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry, there was a major eight-state

study commissioned by the National Institute of Mental Health in 1991. It found that less than

1% of the county court cases within this study actually involved the insanity defense.

Out of this extremely small percentage of cases that actually did attempt to use the insanity defense,

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