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Bruce A. Arrigo, "Insanity Defense Reform and the Sign of Abolition: Re-Visiting Montana's Experience", International Journal for the Semiotics of Law / Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique Vol. X no.29 (1997), 191-211. This paper examines the meaning of insanity defense abolition in the state of Montana. Contributions from Peircean, Greimasian, and Lacanian semiotics are utilized. The Peircean model explains how the sign of abolition represented important social interests for citizens in Montana. The Greimasian approach accounts for how additional meaning was hidden within the deep structure of insanity defense language. Several Lacanian schema reveal why, in the post-Reform period, defense litigators raised the issue of mental defect at the plea/trial phase especially since acquittals were seldom granted and sentencing, if one were found guilty, resulted in harsh penalties. This paper argues further that a Lacanian-inspired psychoanalytic semiotics of law is uniquely positioned to decipher the unconscious forces at work giving rise to semiotic speech production. The inextricable relationship among discourse, subjectivity, and desire in the Montana experience accounts for how juridical meaning was advanced and how litigator identity was denied. That is to say, only medico-legal discourse was embodied by defense attorneys. The interactive effects of several semiotic axes explain how desire was mobilized, manipulated, and configured such that defense litigators, by necessity, invoked only the jargon of psychiatric justice. Both of these features demonstrate how desire in language was both oppressive and liberating. Montana attorneys were compelled to use only that justiciable language available. This language included raising mental defect at the plea stage for purposes of pursuing the incompetency-to-stand-trial (IST) hearing. It was a discourse, however, that led to state hospital rather than state correctional confinement.

Bruce A. Arrigo, Ph.D. received his doctorate from the Pennsylvania State University in the Administration of Justice. He is Professor of Forensic Psychology and Criminology and the Director of the Institute of Psychology, Law, and Public Policy at the California School of Professional Psychology-Fresno. He has published some 40 monographs, peer-review articles, or academic book chapters dealing with issues in crime, law, justice, and community. His most recent books include The Contours of Psychiatric Justice (Garland, 1996); the anthology Justice At The Margins: The Maturation of Critical Theory in Law, Crime, and Deviance (Wadsworth, forthcoming 1997) and with T.R. Young Chaos and Crime: From Criminal Justice to Social Justice (SUNY Press, forthcoming 1998). Recent articles have appeared in Justice Quarterly, Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, Critical Criminology, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Crime, Law, and Social Change, and Theoretical Criminology. Professor Arrigo is also the Editor of the social science quarterly, Humanity and Society.

Direct all correspondence to Bruce A. Arrigo, Professor and Director, Institute of Psychology, Law, and Public Policy, CSPP-Fresno, 5130 E. Clinton Way, Fresno, California, 93727. Email correspondence: barrigo@mail.cspp.edu

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