Pathological gambling and criminal responsibility

There exists significant interdisciplinary support for eliminating the volitional component of the insanity defense. Somewhat in contrast to this trend is the presentation of pathological gambling as a potentially exculpatory condition in criminal trials. The authors discuss three federal appellate court decisions on this attempted inappropriate usage of psychiatric diagnostic nomenclature. All have upheld convictions, and thereby rejected contentions that such an impulse disorder can form the basis for a valid plea of lack of criminal responsibility. It is suggested that the public interest will be served by statutorily making disturbances of behavioral control insufficient to raise a defense of insanity.     

Reviews

Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, xx + 401 pp., £40.00.

Hugh Macdonald, The Soviet Challenge and the Structure of European Security. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990, ix + 318 pp., £38.50.

Jonathan Eyal, ed. The Warsaw Pact and the Balkans: Moscow's Southern Flank. London: Macmillan Press, 1989, xvi + 246 pp., £35.00.

Kurt M. Campbell & S. Neil MacFarlane, eds., Gorbachev's Third World Dilemmas. London & New York: Routledge, 1989, xvi + 270 pp., £35.00.

Terry L. Thompson, Ideology and Policy: The Political Uses of Doctrine in the Soviet Union. London: Westview Press, Westview Special Studies on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1989, viii + 220 pp., $28.95 p/b.

Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, 266 pp., £9.95 p/b.

Maria Lo?, ed., The Second Economy in Marxist States. London: Macmillan, 1990, xiv + 240 pp., £37.50.

Harley D. Balzer, Soviet Science on the Edge of Reform. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1989, xxi + 290 pp., $32.50.

Michael Ryan, Doctors and the State in the Soviet Union. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989, ix + 205 pp., £37.50.

Jerzy Tomaszewski, The Socialist Regimes of East Central Europe: Their Establishment and Consolidation 1944–67, Trans. Jolanta Krauze. London: Routledge, 1989, 305 pp., £40.00.

Paul G. Lewis, Political Authority and Party Secretaries in Poland 1975–1986. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, xix + 340 pp., £35.00.

Leonard J. Cohen, The Socialist Pyramid: Elites and Power in Yugoslavia. Oakville, TX: Mosaic Press, 1989, 499 pp., $29.95 h/b, $19.95 p/b.

Diane P. Koenker & William G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, xix + 393 pp., $39.50.