By way of insanity

There's just one specialist court in New Zealand assessing whether a defendant is mentally fit to enter a plea.

- STEVE BRAUNIAS

There was the man who punched someone in the head but only did so, he explained, because he was wanting to dislodge a scorpion off his victim's face. There was another man who broke into a neighbour's house and smashed a large pot plant due to his belief that the woman placed his family in imminent danger. And later that afternoon, at a very particular set of hearings at the Auckland District Court in early May, there was the man who entered courtroom 11 with a wide, wonderfully warm smile, soon began to wheeze with laughter, tried to hold it in, but the dam burst and he fairly roared with laughter, actually cried with laughter - and then he stopped laughing, and all that was left were tears.

It was a strange and quite often terribly sad day but not unusual, not at all rare; the Criminal Procedure (Mentally Impaired Persons) Court (CPMIP) sits every fortnight, designed to assess the mental health of criminal defendants. It was co-founded five years ago by judges Pippa Sinclair and Clare Harvey. It functions only in Auckland, as New Zealand's most populated catchment of the mentally ill. It decides whether defendants are unfit to stand trial and whether they are insane. It essentially serves as a court of the mad. (Outside of Auckland, a request from the defendant's lawyer or the police may lead to a mental fitness assessment.)