WordNet
n. an urge to do or say something that might be better left undone or unsaid [syn: compulsion]
Wikipedia
In criminal law, irresistible impulse is a defense by excuse, in this case some sort of insanity, in which the defendant argues that they should not be held criminally liable for their actions that broke the law, because they could not control those actions.
In 1994, Lorena Bobbitt was found not guilty when her defense argued that an irresistible impulse led her to cut off her husband's penis.
The Penal Code of the U.S. state of California states (2002), "The defense of diminished capacity is hereby abolished ... there shall be no defense of ... diminished responsibility or irresistible impulse..."
The policeman at the elbow test is a test used by some courts to determine whether the defendant was insane when he committed a crime. It is a variant of the M'Naghten Rules that addresses the situation in which the defendant knew that what he was going to do was wrong, but had no ability to restrain himself from doing it. The test asks whether he would have done what he did even if a policeman was standing at his elbow, hence its name.
Usage examples of "irresistible impulse".
While Italy rejoiced in her deliverance from the Goths, a furious tempest was excited among the nations of Germany, who yielded to the irresistible impulse that appears to have been gradually communicated from the eastern extremity of the continent of Asia.
His palm itched with the almost irresistible impulse to storm up behind her, take her by the nape of the neck and bend her over his knee.
But now, suddenly, Dale felt again that irresistible impulse to pick him up, to put his pathetically red and weeping face on his shoulder, to say, That's all right, Daddy's holding you.
But the half-savage self-control adversity had taught stood him in good stead now, curbing the first natural but reckless wrath which nerved every fibre of his strong young body with an almost irresistible impulse to kill Helwyze without a word.
When her blood beat down this deadlock of an her physical being and rushed on and on through her veins it gave her an irresistible impulse to fly, to sail through space, to ran and run and ran.
It's a Latin that might have come directly out of the school of Cicero, but laced with a carefully measured dash of Church Latin -- and of course it's again impossible to tell whether that is intended naively as bait for us padres, or meant ironically, or simply springs from an irresistible impulse to playact, stylize, and embellish.