Affective Violence, Self-Control, and Extreme Mental and Emotional Disturbance Law

Hawai'i's extreme mental and emotional disturbance (EMED) defense, drawn from the Model Penal Code (MPC), originated in State v. Dumlao with a conception of loss of self-control distinguished from insanity. For three decades, Hawai'i EMED jurisprudence has been read through a clinical theory treating intentional, organized action as evidence of retained self-control. The unvalidated theory displaced Dumlao's understanding while leaving its language intact. This article articulates a contemporary model of affective violence grounded in self-regulation theory, reactive aggression neurobiology, and the threat imminence continuum derived from animal psychology models. EMED-relevant affective violence is specified as catastrophic failure of self-regulatory override, occasioned by subjectively inescapable threat and expressed as defensive attack in the circa-strike phase. Threat may be exogenous or endogenous; what renders it inescapable is appraisal, not physical escapability. Intentional action is retained; effective prefrontal governance fails, producing a state-dependent loss of regulatory transcendence: the capacity to place immediate action in relation to alternatives, standards, future consequences, and reflective self-awareness. The model recovers Dumlao's framing, reconciles EMED doctrine with contemporary neuroscience, honors the statute's objective-subjective pairing, and proposes a testable evidentiary framework for forensic mental state evaluation.