McNaghten Test and the Law of Criminal Insanity

The belief that insanity or mental illness might excuse criminal behavior produced important changes in the substantive criminal law. The so-called insanity defense reflected the influence in the nineteenth century of scientific naturalism, a body of thought that held that physical and emotional causes, rather than moral wickedness,

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explained human behavior. The eugenics movement, studies of heredity, and the infant discipline of psychiatry all stemmed from scientific naturalism.

The common law had historically treated people as rational, autonomous beings responsible for their actions. It required that in order to convict a criminal a mens rea (a criminal intent, in simple terms) had to be established. A person who was demented could not, of course, fulfill that requirement. But the common law imposed a stiff test: the defendant had to show that he or she lacked the basic, fundamental ability to tell right from wrong. A person could not be partly crazed; it was all or nothing.

The common law, however, ran counter to the naturalistic view of human behavior advanced by nineteenth-century students of medical jurisprudence, such as Isaac Ray, the author of Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity ( 1838). Ray was an international authority on insanity who was at the forefront of the movement to erect asylums for the insane. Ray insisted that physical disease of the brain compelled people to act contrary to their own moral standards, and that the traditional common law test (that a person had knowledge that an act was right or wrong) was unduly strict and contrary to scientific knowledge.

Ray indirectly influenced the most important nineteenth-century case involving the insanity defense: Regina v. McNaghten ( 1843). Daniel McNaghten shot and killed Edward Drummond, the personal secretary of British Prime Minister Robert Peel. McNaghten suffered from a delusion that members of Peel's Tory party were persecuting him, and after stalking the prime minister and his party for the better part of a day he placed a pistol at Drummond's back (mistakenly thinking it was Peel) and fired. Counsel for McNaghten attempted to circumvent the common law test by invoking Ray's writings. The jury, guided by the presiding judge, found McNaghten not guilty by reason of insanity.

A storm of protest followed and, in response to it, the House of Lords forced Queen's Bench to define the insanity defense. Ironically, the same court that had encouraged the jury to find the defendant not guilty retreated, formulating the McNaghten or "right or wrong" rule, which amounted to only a slight liberalization of the common law test. The McNaghten rule provided that a defendant's actions could be excused if he was "labouring under such a defect of reason from disease of the mind as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong." ³⁶ The McNaghten rule "completely obliterated the McNaghten precedent." ³⁷

Yet the rule was also a step toward acceptance of mental impairment as a defense to criminal responsibility, because the previous test had held that the accused had to prove that he did not know the difference between right and wrong any more than a "wild beast." ³⁸McNaghten allowed either "defect of reason" or "disease of the mind" to be introduced into evidence as the cause of the accused's failure to distinguish between what was right and what was wrong.

A few jurisdictions in the United States embraced a more liberal standard, notably the irresistible impulse test, to which Ray subscribed. "There are," Ray wrote, "an immense mass of cases where people are irresistibly impelled to the commission of criminal acts while fully conscious of their nature and consequences."³⁹ The majority of states, however, retained the McNaghten test well into the twentieth century.

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to the Negrophobic Ku Klux Klan of the Reconstruction era--appeared in the nineteenth-century United States. In the last sixteen years of that century, there were 2500 recorded lynchings, mostly of blacks in the South and the remainder in the West. Such behavior mocked the rule of law and the inability of the decentralized and poorly funded criminal justice system to strike a meaningful balance between individual liberty and social stability. It was precisely such conditions to which reformers of the Progressive era addressed their efforts, not only in criminal justice but in the broad role of law in society and the economy.

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10
Law, Industrialization, and the Beginnings of the Regulatory State: 1860-1920

From the Civil War through World War I, startling change characterized every aspect of life in the United States. Massive immigration altered the cultural and ethnic mix of the nation. This stream of newcomers merged with a steady flow of Americans leaving the farm to form a mighty river of urbanization. On the eve of the Civil War urbanites (persons living in communities of 2500 or more) represented about 20 percent of the total population. In 1920 more than 50 percent of the population lived in towns and cities. The city symbolized the most dramatic change sweeping the nation: the transformation of the economy from commerce and agriculture to manufacturing and industry.

An explosion of economic growth rocked the United States. The gross national product, which represented the value of all the goods and services produced each year, leaped by $7 billion to over $35 billion. Every possible measure of industrial activity soared. The production of iron and steel jumped from about 900,000 tons at the end of the Civil War to 24 million by World War I. Textile manufacturers in 1860 used about 845,000 bales of cotton; by the turn of the century they consumed more than 4 million bales. Railroad track mileage increased from about 30,000 miles in 1860 to about 240,000 in 1910. Nowhere in the late nineteenth century was economic growth so spectacular as in the United States, already among the very richest nations.

Lawmakers responded to these sweeping economic changes during two broad periods of political development. The first was the "party period," which had its origins in the first mass two-party system of the 1830s and remained vital until the end of the Gilded Age in the late 1890s. ¹ These years were characterized by massive voter participation and, among the major parties, a perpetuation of the traditional distributive role of the legal and political systems. The second era was the Progressive period that

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began about 1900, when Theodore Roosevelt replaced the assassinated President William McKinley, and ended in the conflagration of World War I. The Progressive era was characterized by declining voter participation and a change in emphasis in the law from promotion of economic activity, based on a traditional scheme of distributive justice rooted in politics, to one of regulation based on an increasingly bureaucratic and apolitical model of public policy.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 658