Jury and the Defense of Insanity

Rita J. Simon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351309707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Jurisprudencia

Thirty years after it was first published, the issues raised in The Jury and the Defense of Insanity remain pertinent. Rita James Simon examines how motivated and competent juries are, how well jurors understand and follow judges' instructions, their understand-ing of expert testimony, and the extent to which their own backgrounds and experiences influence their decisions. Simon provides a rare opportunity to observe how jurors go about the process of deliberating and reaching a verdict by following them into the jury room and recording their deliberations. This pathbreaking study of jury room behavior provides compelling evidence of the effectiveness of our trial by jury system.

The Jury and the Defense of Insanity was the product of an experimental study con-ducted as part of the University of Chicago Jury Project. Over 1, 000 jurors were chosen to participate, not as volunteers, but as part of their regular jury duty, in two experimental trials, one on a charge of housebreaking, the other of incest. In each the insanity de-fense was raised. Court judges instructed the jurors to consider the recorded trials they were about to hear with all the care and seriousness they would give to a real criminal prosecution, and the taped recordings of their deliberations make it clear that they did just that. These recordings, along with responses to detailed questionnaires, yielded significant data, equally applicable to civil as to criminal cases. We learn their reactions to their fellow jurors; personal evaluations of the quality and effectiveness of delibera-tions; the degree to which religion, sex, social status, education, and like factors affect participation in and influence on the course of the deliberation; and the recounting of and reliance upon personal experience in seeking to reach a verdict, among other in-sights furnished by this study.

This is an exact record not a description or recollected account of the struggle of a jury to weigh evidence and achieve a just verdict. For lawyers whose job it is to win civil and criminal cases, for behavioral scientists who study male and female reactions in their cultural environment to the circumstances that confront them, and to all who are interested in how people behave and why, in a dramatic, socially significant situation, this is a fascinating and revealing book.

PART I

History and Method

CHAPTER 1

The Defense of Insanity in English and American Courts: A Brief Review

In order to fully appreciate the significance of the Durham decision, we need to place it in historical perspective.

We offer this far from comprehensive review of the courts’ experiences with the insanity defense and with different criteria of criminal responsibility in the hope that it will accomplish three objectives: (1) provide a historical context for the Durham decision, (2) increase the reader’s appreciation for the historical and practical significance of our findings, and (3) increase the reader’s appreciation for the difficulty and complexity of the jury’s task.

Judge John Biggs traces the origins of the defense of insanity in English law to the reign of Henry III (1216-1272).¹ In the historical summary that follows we borrow heavily from Judge Biggs’ scholarship. He finds that persons who committed homicide were pardoned if they were believed to be of unsound mind, and that such occurrences were not unusual. By the reign of Edward I (1272-1307), complete madness became acceptable as a defense to a criminal charge. Until then, the life of an insane criminal could be saved only by a pardon from the king.

By 1581, the relationship between the lack of a guilty mind or a felonious intent and the lack of criminal responsibility was well established. In that year William Lambard, a noted legal authority, published a handbook, Eirenarcha, for justices of the peace that served as a standard reference. In it the author stated:

If a madman or a naturall foole, or a lunatike in the time of his lunacie, or a childe y apparantly hath no knowledge of good nor euil do ki a mā, this is no felonious acte, nor any thing forfeited by it . . . for they cānot be said to haue any understanding wil. But if upō examinatiō it fal out, y they knew what they did, & y it was ill, thē seemeth it be otherwise.

According to Judge Biggs, “knowledge of good and evil” as a test of criminal responsibility originated with this reference by Lambard.

About a century later, Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, wrote his influential History of the Pleas of the Crown and in it distinguished two forms of insanity: total insanity and partial insanity. Hale defined total insanity as “absolute madness,” a condition which leaves the victim “totally deprived of memory and reason.” Hale claimed that such a condition excused a criminal act because the offender could not be deemed to have a felonious spirit or intent. In theory, partial insanity could also excuse an offender; but, in the words of Lord Hale, “it would be a matter of great difficulty.” In practice, the courts behaved as if the defense of insanity was unavailable to any accused who retained even a vestige of sanity.

Mr. Justice Tracy’s instruction in the trial of Edward Arnold ² in 1723 characterized the court’s practice. Mr. Justice Tracy said: “In order to avail himself of the defense of insanity a man must be totally deprived of his understanding and memory, so as not to know what he is doing, no more than in infant, a brute, or a wild beast.” ³ The defendant was found guilty and sentenced to death.⁴ Mr. Justice Tracy’s phrase “no more than an infant, a brute, or a wild beast” marked the origin of the so-called “wild beast test.”

For the next seventy-five years, or until the end of the eighteenth century, English courts grafted the test of knowledge of good and evil and the concept of insanity with ever increasing firmness. With the dawning of the ninteenth century, however, a case arose that challenged, at least temporarily, the relationship between insanity and knowledge of good and evil.⁵ In the opinion of many contemporary jurists, it exemplified the operation of the criminal law of England at its best.

James Hadfield, a soldier noted for bravery in battle, attempted to assassinate George III and was indicted for high treason. During the trial, testimony revealed that Hadfield’s desire to kill the king was motivated by a delusion that he, the defendant, was the savior of all mankind. He thought that in order to gain worldly recognition it was necessary that he sacrifice himself as had Jesus Christ. The defendant concluded that an assault on the life of the king would attain his end of execution and, through it, martyrdom.

From all accounts, Hadfield’s appearance at the trial was grotesque. He had sustained terrible head wounds during battle, and Thomas Erskine, his counsel, stated that “his head hung down as though it has been almost dissevered” and that he had “been cut across all the nerves which give sensibility and animation to the body.” The prosecution argued that the defendant’s behavior (in the purchase of gun and powder and slugs for a pistol and in his concealment of the pistol) indicated that he was neither an idiot nor a madman “afflicted by the absolute privation of reason.”

In his opening statement Lord Erskine, anticipating the Durham rule one hundred and fifty years early, argued that a man could know right from wrong, could understand the nature of the act that he was about to commit, could manifest a clear design, foresight, and cunning in the planning and executing of it, but that if his mental condition produced or was the cause of the criminal act, he should not be held legally responsible for it.

Lord Kenyon, the Chief Justice, recommended to the jury that Hadfield’s trial be terminated. The jury accepted the court’s suggestion and acquitted the defendant, because “he was under the influence of insanity at the time the act was committed.”

The decision in the Hadfield case was considered a landmark because it rejected two concepts previously accepted by the court. It denied that the defendant must be totally deprived of all mental faculty before he could be acquitted; and it severed the tie between insanity and the ability to distinguish good from evil, or right from wrong.⁶

In the next dozen years, three cases were heard in which the defendants were charged with murder and pleaded insanity.⁷ In each case, the English courts returned to the law of criminal responsibility formulated by Mr. Justice Tracy in the Arnold case of 1723. All three of the defendants were found guilty and executed. In one of the trials, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield charged the jury as follows:

. . . it must in fact, be proved beyond all doubt, that at the time he committed the atrocious act with which he stood charged, he did not consider that murder was a crime against the laws of God and nature. There was no proof of insanity which could excuse murder or any other crime.⁸

By 1840, in the opinion of Judge Biggs, “. . . the English common law was rapidly developing a procrustean theory of criminal responsibility for the mentally ill and only the meet occasion was required to bring forth full-blown a complete and disastrous rule of laws.” ⁹ With these remarks, Judge Biggs introduced the case of The Queen Against Daniel M’Naghten,¹⁰ one of the most thoroughly discussed and controversial cases in English and American law.

Daniel M’Naghten was a Scottish woodcutter who assassinated Edward Drummond, secretary to the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, in the mistaken belief that the secretary was the Prime Minister. M’Naghten, “an extreme paranoiac entangled in an elaborate system of delusions,” ¹¹ believed that the Prime Minister was responsible for the financial and personal misfortunes that were continually plaguing him. During the trial nine medical witnesses all testified that the defendant was insane.¹² Although the form of the insanity was not officially designated by the medical witnesses, psychiatrists today who have read reports of the trial believe that M’Naghten was “under the influence of a form of mental disorder symptomized by delusions of persecution in which Peel appeared as one of the persecutors.” ¹³ So convincing was the defense’s plea that at the end of the testimony Lord Chief Justice Tindal, sitting with two other judges, came close to directing the jury’s verdict. He told the jury: “I cannot help remarking in common with my learned brethren that the whole of medical evidence is on one side — that it seems almost unnecessary that I should go through the evidence. I am, however, in your hands.”¹⁴ He then instructed the jury:

The point I shall have to submit to you is, whether on the whole of the evidence you have heard, you are satisfied that at the time the act was committed . . . the prisoner had that competent use of his understanding as that he knew that he was doing, by the very act itself, a wicked and a wrong thing? If the prisoner was not sensible at the time he committed the act, that it was a violation of the law of God or of man, undoubtedly he was not responsible for that act or liable to any punishment flowing from that act . . . If on balancing the evidence in your minds, you think the prisoner capable of distinguishing between right and wrong, then he was a responsible agent and liable to all the penalties the law imposes. If not . . . then you will probably not take upon yourselves to find the prisoner guilty. If this is your opinion, then you will acquit the prisoner.¹⁵

The jury found the defendant “not guilty on the grounds of insanity.” Daniel M’Naghten was committed to Broadmoor mental institution, where he remained until his death in May, 1865, about twenty years later.

Queen Victoria, the House of Lords, and the newspapers of the day disapproved of the verdict in openly angry and bitter tones.¹⁶ M’Naghten’s attempted assassination of the Prime Minister marked the fifth attack on English sovereigns and their ministers since the turn of the century. In 1800 Hadfield had attempted to kill King George III. In 1813 Bellingham had assassinated Spencer Perceval, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord of the Treasury. Between 1840 and 1842 two attempts had been made on Queen Victoria’s life. Now Daniel M’Naghten, a defendant who admitted that he attempted to assassinate the Prime Minister, was declared not guilty on the grounds of insanity and was sent to Broadmoor, a place described by the press as a retreat for idlers. The government and newspapers interpreted the court’s action to be a direct disregard of the dangerous and threatening state of affairs.

The case of Daniel M’Naghten probably would have had a place of distinction in English criminal law even if the uproar had ended on this note of public indignation. But more was still to come. The House of Lords called upon the fifteen judges of the common law courts to respond to a series of questions on the law that the Lords would ask them. In effect, the judges were being asked to account for a miscarriage of justice. Their actions had been severely criticized by the Crown, the House of Lords, and the press, and now they were being confronted directly with their misdeeds.

Lord Chief Justice Tindal answered for all the fifteen common law judges save Mr. Justice Maule, who gave a separate set of answers. Tindal said:

The first question proposed by your Lordships is this: “What is the law respecting alleged crimes committed by persons afflicted with insane delusion i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Part I History and Method
• Part II The Impact of the Experimental Variables on the Jury’s Verdict
• Part III The Influence of Social Status and Attitudes on the Jury’s Decisions
• Part IV The Jury Deliberates
• Part V A Look to the Future
• Appendix A The Deliberation of Jury 57
• Appendix B
• Index