Should a Sociopath go to jail?

This question has bothered me for quite awhile. I remember I heard a law stating that psychopaths who kill cant go to jail instead they go to insane asylums to treat their mental illness (apparently it is not their fault they kill others when they are mentally ill).
Basically this article is saying a male named Yang Jiaqin suffers from hallucinations so he attacked a 63-year- old neighbor, Wu Wenguang, and struck him in the head with an ax. When Mr. Wu was in the hospital getting stitches for his wounds the police chief said to him ““When crazy people hurt somebody, there is nothing we can do.” After a few days Mr. Yang attacked three innocent kids when they were leaving school. He used a cleaver to slash at a first grader, then he turned to a 8-year-olf and sliced his arm and neck, the third boy who was 14-years-old escaped with a slash on his shoulder because he “fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Please don’t hurt me,’ After leaving the crime scene Mr. Yang killed a 70-year-old woman who was making firecrackers, and a man who was watching a television drama on his sofa. He slashed the man’s wife and a girl drawing well water. Later on Mr. Yang got captured and got sent a psychiatric hospital.
I am speechless when I read this article, I don’t know what to feel exactly. Many people say that it is not their fault when they go on a rampage since being a sociopath is largely genetic, but isn’t it still killing. If this sociopath took a life doesn’t that mean that their life should be taken too? There is a saying “an eye for an eye and a life for a like” but does that really apply to this scenario? I feel really confused when I think of this topic because a part of me feels like no matter who kills it is still wrong but another part of me feels like those sociopaths wasn’t thinking clearly when they killed so its not really their fault. If these sociopaths are only sent to a hospital for treating their mental illness then what of the families that had their beloved killed? Do we just ignore them when they are weeping for their dead loved ones just because this killer wasn’t able to control himself? In my perspective I think both sides are immoral because if one supports the killer it would be unfair to the family in sorrow but if one was to stand for the family and demand the killer to go to jail it would be unfair to the killer because it wasn’t their choice to kill.
One may think I am cruel to say that the sociopath shouldn’t go to jail for killing but the thing is, we can’t blame it on a person that didn’t have a choice. This person, or in this case Mr. Yang, didn’t have the option to leave the person alive or not. Gandhi once said, “an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind” it means that we can’t always take revenge because if this cycle continues nothing good will ever come from it. It is wrong to let the sociopath go but it is more wrong to arrest a man/ woman for something he did not have control of.


Reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/world/asia/11psych.html?pagewanted=1&hp