Medicolegal aspects of complex behaviours arising from the sleep period: A review and guide for the practising sleep physician

An Essay on Sleep-Related Sexual Behaviours and Offences Related to Sexual Behaviours

“…It is perhaps not surprising that there are calls for more considered opinions and further research into the whole area of sleep-related violence, let alone sleep-related sexual violence [97]. Extrapolating what is known about parasomnias, given the limited evidence base, which at best is still only at the data-collection phase, to applied situations such as legal cases have to be fraught.…”

Pushing the Margins of Responsibility: Lessons from Parks’ Somnambulistic Killing

“…In terms of Parks' performance, this has many features in common with paradigmatic actions: a) Parks' performance is goal-directed: Parks presumably gets up, opens his front door and that of his garage, goes to his car, opens it, turns it on, drives it off onto the road and follows a more than 20 km long route to the house of his in-laws, then steps out of the car and into the house; in turn, these 7 More on this in Parks Acts section below. 8 Again, here see [9]. 9 Levy in the same passage also writes: BHowever, like the actions of the alien hand, the behaviour is driven by low level motor representations, not by the personal level beliefs of the agent^( [15]:66).…”

“…We assume that the reconstruction of the facts done in court is accurate and Parks was really in a state of somnambulism when he did what he did. Moreover, we rely on current scientific accounts of somnambulistic action as they are presented, for example, in Ebrahim and Fenwick [7] and Morrison et al [8].…”

“…Something similar may be true of Parks' actions. 8 Before concluding this section, we would like to anticipate a further possible objection. It may be thought that what we have said so far may apply to some but not all of what Parks does during his somnambulism episode.…”

Calls for an International Consensus on Sleep-Related Violence and Sexual Behavior in Sleep Are Premature

“…2 A consensus statement would be prone to becoming an exercise in the politics of the fi eld, given the paucity of evidence. Furthermore, an international consensus could not address the needs of different jurisdictions; subtly different legal questions may require different assessments for forensic sleep disorders.…”