Deborah Denno comments to Omnilogos on parasomnias, a group of sleep disorders that includes sleepwalking and night-terrors, a bad night can quickly become a catastrophe.
Research by Fordham University School of Law professor Deborah Denno revealed that there isn’t a set framework for assessing whether a defendant was likely sleepwalking when violence occured—his fate can hinge on the sophistication of the attorney and the sleep experts who testify. Many judges and lawyers remain dubious that someone could execute a complex, violent act while sleeping. Determining whether a person was sleepwalking could mean the difference between a full acquittal or prison—with the possibility of the death penalty. There is no middle ground between incarceration and freedom, and no record of how often police deal with cases of possible sleepwalking.
Those extreme options spurred Dermo to pen a 2002 paper, published in the Minnesota Law Review, arguing that the way courts view sleep needs reform. The foundations of the criminal code pertaining to unconscious and involuntary states such as sleepwalking haven’t been thoroughly updated since the ’50s, when Freudian interpretations of consciousness were widely accepted and scientific understanding of sleep was rudimentary. Courts have done little to reach uniform standards since her article was published.
Denno argues that judges and juries need a third way to classify a defendant’s actions: semi-voluntary. As an example, she cites Kenneth Parks. “Someone like him may need to be told, ‘If for the next year you take your medication and keep out of trouble, we won’t prosecute this crime,’” she says. In such a system, there would be a record of each incidence of sleep violence, and people with parasomnias would need to act responsibly or risk prosecution for any crime they committed. Such an approach would pull cases of sleep violence out of the shadows and give sleep crime researchers data they’re sorely missing. All this could have major significance with respect to developing fair standards for sleep cases.
This Omnilogos story ran on September 23, 2013.
