New York’s test for legal insanity: "a person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law." The mental disease or defect requires a mental diagnosis. Madoff’s years of secrecy about his actions seems inconsistent with an insanity defense. 
Better, perhaps, can Madoff receive a fair trial anywhere in the English speaking world?
Bernie’s funda-mental defense
Published in the Huffington Post.
If you thought Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion investment scheme was audacious, get ready for his alibi. Lawyers for the accused scammer are exploring an insanity defense, we hear.
“Bernie’s family and his attorneys may argue that, somewhere along the line, he had a mental break,” says a Madoff acquaintance. “They may even say he has a multiple personality disorder.”
Madoff’s grip on reality does show signs of slipping. The 70-year-old financier, now a prisoner of his East Side penthouse, wore a weird smile when he was photographed shortly after his Dec. 12 arrest…
“He seems really out of it,” says a source, who believes Madoff’s family fears he’ll follow the example of Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, the Madoff client who slit his wrists last week. “He has a very low affect. Bernie barely speaks…
He could argue that Madoff committed the fraud during manic, euphoric periods and that he never found the equilibrium to correct his crime. Or that he was so delusional that he convinced himself the investment returns were real. You might also plead that he was incapacitated by some character disorder, like a malignant narcissism stemming from an early-life trauma.
“Insanity defenses rarely work,” Ablow notes. “But if you can influence just one juror, he may stand a chance.”
No doubt people will call him crazy like a fox and recall mobster Vincent (Chin) Gigante, who tried to escape jail by mumbling and stumbling around the streets in his bathrobe.
Top criminal attorney Edward Hayes doesn’t think it will fly: “Madoff admitted to his sons that he knew it was a Ponzi scheme…"
Read more here.
