Not Criminally Responsible (NRC)

Not Criminally Responsible Crimes (NRC) has been highly studied and a popular topic of conversation in the past ten years. Due to a rise in media coverage of said crimes, public opinions have seemed to increase as well. To engage in the ongoing conversation about NRC, one must first understand what it means to be Not Criminally Responsible. According to Maeder, Yamamoto & Fenwick (2015), “the verdict [of NRC cases] means that the court has ruled that the accused was not criminally liable for his or her actions at the time the offence was committed”. Overall trends on what has been published on the topic mostly revealed that attitudes toward the NCR defence were predominantly negative. However, research has revealed that recidivism rates were …show more content…
(Poulin, 2007) suggests that, “experts can help jurors understand the way in which vagaries perception and memory undermine the accuracy of eyewitness identification” (p.27). She stated that, “they also illustrate the ways in which … perception and memory can generate false but convincing identification testimony” (Poulin, 2007, para 2.). Confidence shown by a witness can positively persuade a jury but it is not necessarily synonymous with accuracy.
In this case, the three boys at the centre of the De Oliveira case gave a testimony. According to (CBC, 2010), one of the boys told the court, “someone pushed his two friends onto the tracks and tried to push him as well but that he was able to avoid falling to the tracks”. He added that, “he thought the man who pushed them had mental health issues”. He even went on to say, "He wasn't looking at me; he was looking through me" (paras.