I understand that mens rea should generally be present in crimes in order for convictions but eight years for doing what he did is itself insane.

Reading up on his background, I wonder if he just snapped and killed the guy out of anger for whatever reason and then started cannibalizing the corpse so that he could play the mental illness card at court.

If someone has an epileptic seizure or a diabetic goes into hypoglycemic shock whilst driving and gets into a head on collision and kills someone should they go to prison? They call it mental illness for a reason.

I’ve known people with epilepsy who were banned from driving due to this possibly. If they had driven and gotten a seizure and killed someone, they would have been driving with a reckless disregard for the safety of others, which is enough of a mens rea to form intention for some level of murder conviction.

It is likely this is largely true, even if not formally banned from driving, so the answer is probably yes to your hypothetical they should go to prison, or pulling the normative phrase out, likely would go to prison (subject to many mitigating factors).

Perhaps epilepsy was a bad choice. How about for cardiac arrest, stroke, or any number of undiagnosed medical conditions that could cause someone to create dangerous/fatal conditions outside of their control?

> They call it mental illness for a reason.

Even if we accept your premise that having a mental illness precludes one from taking responsibility for their actions, you still have to deal with the fact that they are a serious danger to society. One of the uses of prison is to take people who would otherwise murder and eat people and remove them from society, so that they can't do that.

I am making a moral argument, not a legal one.

I don't think he should be in jail, but he probably shouldn't be riding any more buses either.

Even if that's true, that's still well beyond a reasonable bound of sanity. Agreed that 8 years seems a bit light though, considering the notoriety of the crime.