Justice & Law Quote by Peggy Noonan

Noonan’s line skewers a familiar courtroom and cable-news script: the bigger the horror, the more we rush to medicalize it, until “crazy” becomes a moral escape hatch. The bite is in her deliberately simplistic syllogism. By stating the logic in its most childish form, she exposes how often public debate relies on the same crude math: atrocity equals insanity; insanity equals diminished responsibility; diminished responsibility equals absolution. It’s not that she denies mental illness. She’s attacking the way “mental illness” can be deployed as a rhetorical solvent that dissolves agency.

The subtext is cultural as much as legal. In a society that prizes therapeutic language, diagnosis can feel like the only acceptable way to talk about evil without sounding religious or vengeful. Noonan is arguing that this therapeutic reflex has a political convenience: it reframes a frightening moral rupture as a treatable anomaly, an individual pathology rather than a choice with consequences. That move protects the audience from the harder implication that ordinary humans, not movie monsters, can commit atrocities.

Contextually, Noonan writes from a conservative, responsibility-forward tradition that distrusts what it sees as elite excuses and narrative overreach. Her phrasing (“nothing is your fault”) is intentionally absolute, because she’s warning about a slippery rhetorical drift: from explaining behavior to exonerating it. The line works because it’s less a diagnosis of criminals than of our own hunger for a story that makes horror manageable.