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The Cognitive Psychology of Mens Rea

“…Olsen-Fulero and Fulero found in their study of rape prototypes that "[v]irtually all participants described a rape by a stranger occurring at night in a park or parking lot, even though most real rapes occur in a woman's own home or during a date," suggesting that "a juror's commonsense schema of rape is very often discrepant from the facts of a given or typical court case. , 287 And Skeem and Golding have found that the typical defendant who is acquitted by reason of insanity-a psychotic man with a psychiatric history who commits a violent crime-matches only 21% of juror insanity prototypes, suggesting that "many jurors' prototypes of insanity are prone to convict.…”