Impediments to Criminal Liability Arising from The Lack of Awareness in The Palestinian and Jordanian Legal Systems

Abstract

This research, entitled “Impediments to Criminal Liability Arising from the Lack of Awareness in the Palestinian and Jordanian Legal Systems,” deals with the legal regulation of impediments to punishment in cases where a person is unconscious and conscious, namely insanity and related mental illnesses such as epilepsy and hysteria, and the absence of reason resulting from drunkenness and drugs without consent, and young age. The main problem in this research was to clarify the legal regulation of everything related to the absence of criminal responsibility for factors or impediments that negate awareness, by clarifying the effect of these factors as mentioned in the Jordanian Penal Code and the draft Palestinian Penal Code, using the analytical descriptive approach by reviewing the legal texts regulating impediments to criminal responsibility arising from the absence of awareness and analyzing these texts. At the end of the research, the researcher reached the most important results, which are that the principle assumed by the law is the existence of a sound mental state at the time of committing the crime until proven otherwise, and that the insane person and the person with an absent mind as a result of drugs and drunkenness that he took against his will and the minor who is not discerning are persons from whom criminal responsibility is dropped and who are not punished for their actions that are committed at the time of their presence. These cases are within the legal conditions due to the absence of the moral element of the crime.