An evaluation of the M'Naghten Rules and other versions of the insanity defense in the criminal law

Lykken, David T.

English

DAVID T. LYKKEN

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The Sciences

IF A MAN BE MAD

Cognitive Sciences ePrint Archive

IF A MAN BE MAD
A scientist testljks against the insanity defense
BY DAVID 1. LYKKEN
A LTHOUGH  NOT KNOWN for her wit, theyoung Queen Victoria indulged her-
self in one immortal quip:“We do not be-
lieve that anyone could be insane who
wanted to murder a Conservative Prime
Minister.” She was referring to Daniel
M’Naghten, a man tangled in paranoid de-
lusions who, in 1843, thinking to strike back
at the leader of the faction he believed to
be persecuting him, determined to shoot
Robert Peel, the Tory Prime Minister, but
mistakenly murdered Peel’s secretary in-
stead. MNaghten was reasonably intelli-
gent and certainly not a raving lunatic, yet
his delusions were obvious enough that the
judge on the case, Chief Justice Tindal, di-
rected the jury to find M’Naghten not guil-
ty of murder by reason of insanity.
That a man might procure a weapon for
the purpose of killing the prime minister,
deliberately shoot to death a person whom
he mistook for his intended victim, and yet
escape the hangman, led to heated contro-
versy. M’Naghten was not the first English-
man to succeed in an insanity plea, but the
disconcerting method in his madness and
the eminence of his target motivated the
Louis Leopold Boilly, Reunion de T&es Diverses
House of Lords to submit certain interrog-
atories to the judges of England. The
judges replied with a simple-seeming for-
mula that came to be known as the
M’Naghten Rules for the adjudication of
the insanity defense. Although the rules’
legal standing was dubious, and certainly
unique, and debate developed quickly as
to what the phrases really meant in prac-
tice, the rules continue to define insanity in
Britain and, also, in some thirty of the
United States:
..* to establish a defence on the ground of in-
sanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the
timeofthecommittingof theact, thepartyac-
cuse  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 he was doing wrong.
An able-bodied law clerk could not car-
ry in one load all the exegeses of this simple
tex  that have subsequently appeared:
sc olarly analyses of the intended or prop-
er meaning of “defect of reason,” “disease
of the mind,” “nature and quality,” and es-
pecially, of course, those really difficult
concepts, “know” and Ywrong.n A sane per-
son knows the nature and quality of the act
of homicide both intellectually (to termi-
nate life) and emotionally (as dreadful and
abhorrent). If the accused knows in the first
sen e but not in the second, is that person
s ne? Is an act wrong if it is against the law;
or if it is held to be wrong in the common
o inion; or if it is held wrongonly because
o hers do not know certain facts known to
me; or if, although others consider it
wrong, God has ordered me to do it?
A coherent and rational solution to this
old problem is much to be desired, and for
several reasons. Although they are infre-
David T. Lykken, professor of psychia-
try andpsychology at the University of
Minnesota, is apsychophysiologbt with
special interests in behavioral genetics
and twins and in forensic applications
of psychology. He is the author of A
TREMOR  IN  THE BLOOD: USES AND ABUSES
OF THE LIE DETECTOR. Spectrum is a
forum for continuing dkcussion  of is- n
sues raised by members of the scientific
community.
II
Spectrum
n%
n,
n
quent, trials involving the insanity defense
are protracted and expensive for all con-
cerned. Psychiatry is displayed to bad ad-
vantage in the inevitable battle of expert
witnesses. Most seriously, public respect
for the law itself is injured whenever some
obvious scoundrel attempts the insanity
defense, even though these attempts very
seldom succeed. In Minneapolis recently, a
young hoodlum in a stolen car shot the po-
lice officer who stopped him for question-
ing, and then had the public defender reg-
ister a plea of not guilty by reason of insan-
ity on the grounds that he had been “high”
on drugs that day and was therefore not re-
sponsible. That such a maneuver is possible
might well lead the dead officer’s colleagues
to find justification for administering their
own punishments in the future.
John W. Hinckley, Jr. tried to assassinate
President Reagan and almost succeeded;
one of his three victims lost a part of his
brain that can never be replaced. The act
was committed before television cameras
and the perpetrator apprehended on the
spot, gun in hand. Now, as this article goes
to press, Hinckley’s trial is in its third expen-
sive week. He has pleaded insanity, and the
prosecution is laboring to refute the claim
that he was not responsible for his actions.
Eminent psychiatrists have testified for
both sides, confidently asserting plausible,
yet contradictory, opinions. I find it hard
to believe that this defense will succeed, but
the mere fact that it can be attempted jeop-
ardizes the vital consensus of confidence
in the rule of law. What if the prosecution
blunders on some technicality and the court
is forced to find this man not guilty of a
crime that millions of citizens witnessed on
television? Could the American justice
system survive such humiliation?
ALIENISTSHNE~~ER beenhappywiththeM’Naghten Rules nor with the
concept of insanity itself, since it does not
correspond to any psychiatric category.
Persons who were plainly psychotic have
failed the M’Naghten test as, indeed,
MNaghten, who was a paranoid psychotic,
probably would have failed it himself had
the rules been formulated earlier. A liber-
alization to include the idea of irresistible
impulse has often been urged, sometimes
successfully. American courts have tended
to be more liberal (that is, more amenable
to psychiatric opinion) than the British,
beginning as early as 1869, with New
Hampshire v. Pike, in which the appellate
court ruled that the defendant should be
acquitted if “the killing was the offspring
or product of mental disease.” Similarly, in
a decision now known as the Durham Rule,
Judge David Bazelon, in a District of Co-
lumbia case, concluded in 1954 that “an ac-
cused is not criminally responsible if his,
unlawful act was the product of mental
disease or mental defect.”
But many courts, reflecting as they must
the general opinion, have resisted such lib
eralization. Counsel for Robert Pate, on
trial in 1850 for the high misdemeanor of
striking Queen Victoria with his walking
stick, claimed irresistible impulse, but
Baron Alderson, presiding, retorted, “A
man might say that he picked a pocket
from some uncontrollable impulse, and in
that case the law would have an uncontrol-
lable impulse to punish him for it.”
The Durham Rule seems a perilously
slipp ry slope, for there is probably no
crime that, in the psychologist’s perspec-
tive, would not appear to be the product of
mental disease or defect. This is easily dem-
onstrated by trying to imagine what cate-
gory of offender a psychiatrist would re-
j ct as mentally healthy and thus outside
his jurisdiction. The psychiatrist might say
that he or she lacks the facilities necessary
for treating this problem, or does not have
a treatment, or that the defect that led to
the criminal behavior has now sp ntane-
ouslyremitted. But thepsychiatrist iscom-
mit ed to the deterministic view that all ab-
err nt behavior is the product of aberrant
psychological states or processes that, in
principle, could be remedied.
Th  law’s premises are more complicated
t n psychiatry’s. Fist is the ancient doc-
trine of just deserts, which probably re-
flects the need for the Ring’s justice to sat-
isfy the public outrage lest citizens be too
tempted to take justice back into their own
hands. Second is the principle of deter-
rence. The miscreant and others who might
be similarly tempted must be shown that
uch behavior will be punished. The deter-
rent effect equals the severity of the pun-
ishment multiplied by the presumed prob-
ability of getting caught. Since we are sur-
prisingly inefficient at catching criminals,
we try to compensate by punishing more
harshly the ones we catch. The third prem-
ise of the criminal law is that society
should be protected by the segregation of
dangerous persons.
Finally, there is the principle of rehabiii-
tation. Here, at least, the law stands shoul-
der to shoulder with psychiatry but its
shoulders have slumped in discourage-
ment in recent years. Rehabilitation does
not s em to be working. For every inmate
who completes a sentence with newly ac-
quired job skills and a determination to go
straight, there seems to be at least one other
whose prison experience has so twisted or
embittered him that he is now less likely to
reform than if he had never been caught in
the first place.
In earlier times, concern about the in-
sanity defense centered on the issue of cap-
tal punishment. When Eliza Dart, in a fit
12
of postpartum depression, drowned her
infant child, hoping thereby to protect it
from a sinful world, no reasonable person
in Victorian England wanted Dart to hang
on the same gibbet with a murderous high-
wayman. Yet even with the decreasing use
of the death sentence, debate on this ques-
tion remains vigorous, although the insan-
ity defense is actually seldom offered and
rarely sustained. Moreover, its success
seems frequently to be an academic ques-
tion from the viewpoint of the accused,
since the only difference it makes to the ac-
c ed is whether the grim institution in
which he or she is incarcerated is called a
prison or a hospital. A defendant who is
plainly psychotic is unlikely now even to
come to trial, but instead will be commit-
ted to a psychiatric hospital as unfit, by
reason of mental illness, to assist in his or
her own defense.
Our mistake, perhaps, has been to try to
solve a legal problem with a psychiatric for-
mula. The law wants to know who is re-
sponsible and who can be considered guilty
of acrime. But psychiatry cannot make that
distinction, cannot classify this act as deter-
mined and, therefore, guiltless, and that
act as freely chosen and, therefore, blame-
worthy. If Dart intended that her child
should die, then we must accept that she is
guilty of the crime of murder. Defenders of
the insanity plea resist this idea, confusing
guilty (“having committed . . . a delinquen-
cy, crime, or sin”) with culpable (“deserving
of punishment”). No doubt it is burden-
some to have it recorded that one was guilty
of murder, even if one is never punished
for it. But it is also burdensome to be men-
tally ill (or to be murdered, for that matter),
and the law cannot undertake to protect us
from all the unhappy consequences of our
misfortunes. The question of what Dart
did o  meant to do (mensrea) can properly
be decided by a jury in the usual way. It is
conc ivable that psychiatric testimony
might be relevant at this stage, but only in
exceptional circumstances.
I  most cases, the question of mental ill-
ness ought to enter only later, after the facts
of the case, of who did what to whom, have
been decided. Once the defendant has
been found guilty, the next step is to deter-
mine the proper disposition. Shall we sen-
tenc  Dart to prison or shall we treat her
depr ssion and, when it has lifted, turn her
loose? Shall we send Hinckley to the peni-
tentiary for the statutory period, or shall
we put him in a security hospital until the
doct s are satisfied that he is no longer a
menace to the community? These are deci-
sions that a judge, advised by psychiatric
experts, can probably arrive at more wisely
tha  a jury can.
Florida has experimented with a bifur-
c ted trial system in which the question of
what happened is decided in stage one,
while the question of insanity is threshed
out by an adversarial process before the
same jury in stage two. This would seem
merely to prolong the agony without ac-
complishing any useful reform. Idaho’s
legislature recently voted to abolish the in-
sanity defense altogether, while permitting
the judge to consider evidence of mental
illness in deciding on the length and type of
sentence. Here one might question the lack
of any formal mechanism to ensure that
the defendant has been competently exam-
ined and that the judge will receive good
psychiatric advice.
T
HE DEFECTSOFBOTHSYSTEMS might be
circumventedby a modification of the
two-stage process. If the defendant did the
deed and meant to do it (as distinguished
from an inadvertance or an accident), then
he or she would be found guilty by a jury in
stage one. Stage two would be designated as
a hearing rather than a trial, and the jury
would be replaced by a court-appointed
panel of, say, two board-certified psychia-
trists, a penologist or parole-board mem-
ber, a police official (to help squelch police
complaints of “coddling”), and one strong-
minded lay person. Defense counsel would
offer witnesses, including psychiatric ex-
perts, but the panel would be permitted to
question them directly.
The object of this hearing would be,
first, to determine whether the crime was a
product of an identifiable mental disor-
der; if not, sentencing would proceed in
the ordinary way. If the defendant is held
to have been mentally ill when the crime
was committed, the panel would make rec-
ommendations as to disposition, with dis-
senting opinions permitted. The judge
would make the final decision, and the
court’s overriding concern would be the
public safety. Should it be concluded that
the crime was a result of some treatable
disorder, a security hospital could be given
the responsibility both to treat the illness
and to determine when a cure had been ef-
fected and the patient could safely be re-
leased. Deranged but untreatable mis-
creants might be remitted to a hospital for
custody rather than treatment, if it were
felt that they would be a danger to them-
selves or others in a prison setting, or that
they would continue to be a danger to soci-
ety if released at the end of the normal
prison term.
Let’s test this proposal by imagining how
it might deal with the trendy insanity de-
fense based on the effects of premenstrual
tension. According to a recent New York
Times report, “Two women walked free
from British criminal courts in November
after having killed or threatened to kill.
They were released after pleading that pre-
Spectmm
me strual tension had made them act out
of character.” Since there was no dispute as
to the facts in either case, it can be presumed
that both women would have pleaded guilty
in my jurisdiction, thus avoiding the ex-
pen es of the stage-one trial.
Were I sitting on the panel at the stage-
two hearing, I would listen sympathetic-
ally to expert testimony that, in some wom-
en, the hormonal tides preceding menstru-
ation yield such a turmoil of emotion as
might compel anyone to violence. I would
suggest that the defendant be held in cus-
tody for several months of endocrinologi-
cal study to determine if, in fact, her pre-
menstrual changes were out of the ordi-
nary range. If not, I would recommend the
standard sentence for her offense. If the
tes s were positive, a regimen of monthly
progesterone injections or other treatment
could be implemented and tested for effec-
tive ess by observing her behavior during,
say,  year in a security hospital. On her re-
lease, I would recommend indefinite pro-
ba ion during which she would be required
to present herself each month for prophy-
lactic treatment. These measures would
have no retributive intent but instead
would be a reasonable response to the fact
that, left to herself, the woman was peri-
odically dangerous.
What about the law’s agenda, those hard
questions of fair punishment and adequate
deterrence? The sense of fairness is most
outraged when the client of a clever (and
expensive) attorney is found to be “not
guilty by reason of insanity.” Even in Vic- ps
torian times, alienists were pointing to de-=
fendants’ long histories of immoral and vi-
olent behavior as evidence of mental dis-
ease, leading critics to suggest that previ-
ous depravity is acurious basis on which to
beg forgiveness for a present offense. In
the system recommended here, this sort of
thing should never happen.
The question of deterrence concerns
whether an onlooker might be led to sup
pose that he or she, too, could yield to some
criminal impulse and yet avoid punish-
ment. One wonders if this ever really hap-
pens, whether anyone reading about a suc-
cessful insanity defense has cold-blood-
edly proceeded with some outrage, plan-
ning to feign insanity as an escape route.
Even if it seldom happens, as I would sup-
pose  the fact that this seems a possibility
to the ordinary citizen and imperils respect
for the criminal justice system is sufficient
cause for concern. Placing the final deci-
sion in the hands of the judge rather than
the jury would seem to obviate this prob-
lem also. No clever lawyer will “get me off
on an insanity plea; if I commit a crime and
am discovered, I will be found guilty. If I
then suppose that, unassisted by legal tech-
nicalities, I can mislead the judge and his
or her expert advisers, I am probably mad
after all. n
I Benjamin Rush’s Tranquillizing Chair, 1810
13


If a Man be Mad

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