CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW — The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague invited Case Western Reserve University School of Law Dean Michael Scharf and his colleagues at the Public International Law and Policy Group (PILPG) to submit an amicus brief on the application of the insanity defense in the case of The Prosecutor v. Dominic Ongwen. The defendant in the case, 45-year-old Dominic Ongwen, had been kidnapped by Joseph Koney’s Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda as an eight year old and forced to become a child soldier. Over the years, Ongwen rose through the ranks to become one of the top commanders in the insurgent group at the time of his surrender to the ICC. At trial, the defense presented expert testimony that because Ongwen had been forcibly indoctrinated by the Lord’s Resistance Army as a child, he suffered from a mental disease or defect that precluded culpability before the ICC. The prosecution presented its own psychiatric witnesses to counter the defense. The trial chamber held that Ongwen had failed to meet the burden of proving the mental disease or defect defense. It sentenced him to 25 years for war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder, rape and sexual enslavement.