When you’re accused of a crime and taken to court, you and your lawyer can come up with all sorts of creative ways to defend yourself. One of the more creative ways to try and get out of something is known as “The Matrix defense,” e.g. arguing that you shouldn’t go to prison for your crimes because you genuinely were living in a simulated reality when you committed them. It’s essentially part of an insanity defense.
Does it work? Not usually, but as University of Alabama criminal justice professor Adam Lankford tells Oxygen.com, that doesn’t stop people from trying to use it.
When The Matrix was first released in 1999, it became an instant cult classic. For some it was a popcorn flick starring Keanu Reeves, and for others it became a way of life.
The idea of living in a simulation isn’t new. In fact it’s a hallmark of science fiction, from the first Twilight Zone back in the ’60s to the new one managed by Jordan Peele. The idea of life being an artificial construct has gained momentum as technology gets us closer to “the future” with virtual reality and video games that take us away from real life and into a virtual world where the normal rules don’t apply.
What is “The Matrix defense” and can it really be used in a court of law?
The Oxygen article comes out around the same time as Glitch in the Matrix, a new film that explores the 2003 case of 19-year old Joshua Cooke. Cooke killed his parents and blamed the crime on The Matrix, claiming that his life was not real. Cooke was a huge fan of the movie, and his attorneys were preparing to use “The Matrix defense” to argue that he didn’t think he was actually doing anything wrong because the world is just a simulation.
Cooke’s lawyers ended up not going down this route, but that wasn’t the only time the idea came up. In 2002, Tonda Lynn Ansley shot and killed her landlord and employer, Sherry Lee Corbet, and claimed she didn’t think she was committing murder because this wasn’t reality. “They commit a lot of crimes in The Matrix,” she told police after her arrest. “That’s where you go to sleep at night and they drug you and take you somewhere else and then they bring you back and put you in bed and when you wake up, you think that it’s a bad dream.”
Ansley was found innocent by reason of insanity, so in a way, “The Matrix defense” worked for her.
“The Matrix films offer several themes that could be attractive to many viewers: that their dissatisfaction with their life is to blame on powerful and manipulative forces, that escape is possible, and that fighting back will be empowering and heroic,” Lankford said. “Along with influencing countless fans who are psychologically healthy, it’s not surprising that these movies might influence some severely mentally ill people as well.”
"For defense attorneys, part of the insanity defense is typically arguing that your client couldn’t distinguish right from wrong. So these lawyers might be prone to emphasize the influence of The Matrix because it frames violence as morally justified. If their clients also believed they were being controlled by the U.S. government or the CIA, for example — as other mentally ill criminals have claimed in the past — that is harder to use because most people would be expected to know that violence against the government or its agencies is wrong, even if you disagree with them."
So “The Matrix defense” is mostly about establishing someone’s disturbed mental state and helping them get sent to an institution rather than prison; it doesn’t actually argue that the person isn’t responsible for what they did because a movie or game made them commit the crime. Some defenses do point to violence in entertainment as the cause of crime, but that’s very difficult to prove. “ver recent decades the trends have been going in opposite directions, with violence increasing in entertainment content but decreasing in society,” said Lankford, “which suggests there is no simple cause and effect relationship overall.”
As new technology blurs the edge between reality and fantasy, there is every reason to believe that “The Matrix defense” will continue to be used, especially with a new Matrix movie around the corner. It’s not a slam dunk, but it certainly makes for some interesting courtroom drama.
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