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Alcoholic Blackout

Psychological Factors Underlying Criminal Behavior

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In old fashioned history books, the highest tribute paid to a king was to say that he was just, he helped the poor and punished the wicked. In those days a law-abiding people were sorely in need of protection against powerful law-breakers. Today the power of the state is firmly established. True, quite a number of crimes are never detected; but no criminal has the slightest chance of openly defying society. If we read of a manhunt in the country we give the poor devil a fortnight at the outside; we know that by then the armed machinery of the law will surely have overtaken him. Society has the right and the duty to protect itself. But its superiority in strength over the individual delinquent

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Alcoholic Blackout for Criminally Relevant Behavior

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Some criminal suspects claim to have had an alcohol-induced blackout during crimes they have committed. Are alcoholic blackouts a frequently occurring phenomenon, or are they merely used as an excuse to minimize responsibility? Frequency and type of blackout were surveyed retrospectively in two healthy samples (n  256 and n  100). Also, a comparison of blood alcohol concentrations was made between people who did and those who did not claim a blackout when stopped in a traffic-control study (n  100). In the two survey studies, blackouts were reported frequently by the person himself (or herself) and others (67% and 76%, respectively) in contrast to the traffic-control study (14%), in which blackouts were reported only when persons were involved in an accident. These results indicate that although blackouts during serious misbehavior are reported outside the court, both the denial and the claim of alcoholic blackout may serve a strategic function.

The following vignette is based on a real case. Amsterdam, 1999. A 30-year-old man consumed a considerable

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