I was thinking the other day, what would happen if someone were to suffer traumatic brain injury, resulting in complete memory loss after committing a crime?

Is it still ethical to jail someone who is essentially a new person? =o

How would a court even handle this? Anyone heard of it happening?

I mean imagine waking up in a new body and finding out you were going to prison for 10+ years, not even knowing anything about what happened before. That would suck lmfao

This post was edited by slacks420 on Jan 2 2015 03:18pm

Similar conversations are pretty common among mental health professionals. How do you handle accountability?

is his sense of morality the same as it was before he lost his memory? court cases of crimes committed while blacked out on alcohol might give some insight on the topic. Afaik the perpetrators are held accountable in such cases even if they lack the experience of committing the crime and had impaired judgement.

Yeah it's a tough thing to deal with I'd say.

Prednam, this would be a rare case in which the mind has essentially completely reset and the new consciousness may produce a completely different personality with a new set of morals all together.
I suppose trying to solve this is like figuring out how we define a life in abortion arguments, pretty much impossible and inevitably we would maybe still have to treat the person as the old personality, no matter how bad it would suck for the new, perfectly innocent mind.

Or I suppose on the other hand, we could treat the old personality as dead and say that the criminal consciousness was effectively executed. That's a tough sell to the victim, though. Maybe it should be completely up to the victim to decide if charges would still be pushed forward, so at least any burden of guilt over punishing a new personality for the old personality's crimes would be put pretty much only on him.

This post was edited by slacks420 on Jan 2 2015 05:43pm

It would be wisest to detain them, at the very least.
As just because they have lost their memory, they did commit a crime and may offend again.

Yes, they still did it.

Can't prove they actually lost their memory?

Even if you believe we chose nothing in life and that everything we do is bound to have happened because of combinaison of your genes (and the brain it has given you, the capacity to make efforts, to have judgement and etc), environnement, luck and etc.
It is wise to act as if the person did that on purpose, even if nothing we do, would really be our fault.

Still did the crime so gotta do the time, regardless of what happens after the crim has been committed