Insanity & the Law

Daniel M'Naghten. a Glasgow wood turner, thought that Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel was persecuting him. Then he confused Peel with his secretary, Edward Drummond. So M'Naghten shot and killed Drummond, Jan. 20, 1843. The jury's verdict: "not guilty"--by reason of insanity. The case so shook Britain that the judicial committee of the House of Lords suggested a hard and fast rule: to prove "insanity," a defendant must show-that he was either "laboring under such a defect of reason from disease of the mind as not to know the nature and quality of the act; or, if he did know it, that he did riot know he was doing what was wrong." Thus the famed "M'Naghten Rule," which in the main has guided U.S. and British courts ever since.

Last week Monte W. Durham, 26, a stocky figure in a wide-striped blue suit, stood in Washington's District Court and heard Judge David Pine sentence him to a prison term of one to four years for housebreaking and robbery. The Durham case, already famous among psychiatrists and lawyers, is a direct challenge to the M'Naghten rule.

No Yes or No. When, in 1951. Monte Durham was arrested in a petty housebreaking, he had been in and out of St. Elizabeths Hospital four times in six years. Psychiatrist Joseph Gilbert had no hesitation in testifying that Durham was of "unsound mind" at the time of the crime. Under the M'Naghten rule, the question was whether he knew that what he was doing was wrong. Said Dr. Gilbert in effect: this could not be answered yes or no. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia reversed Durham's conviction on a technicality, then held the M'Naghten rule no longer valid. In his second trial, a jury again found Durham guilty, but the court's earlier opinion on the M'Naghten rule still stands, for the District of Columbia.

It will so stand unless upset by the Supreme Court, and will carry weight in other jurisdictions.

The Appeals Court's ruling echoed a majority of psychiatrists, who have long opposed the M'Naghten rule. Some argue that mental competence is not directly involved in a moral question of right and wrong. Others protest that it is always difficult and sometimes impossible to determine, months or years after a crime, whether the accused knew that it was wrong when he committed it. Over the years, the only major modification of the M'Naghten rule was the addition of the idea that a man might be driven to crime by an "irresistible impulse." But that did not satisfy psychiatrists either: a crime might be coolly prepared and still be the act of a madman. In fact, what has kept psychiatry and the law at loggerheads is the lawyers' attempt to force the psychiatrists to testify in legal terms (insanity is a legal, not a medical concept), while the psychiatrists have tried to force the lawyers to argue in the complex, changing terms of psychiatry.

No Easy Out. Siding with the psychiatrists, the court reasoned: "As an exclusive criterion the right-wrong test is inadequate in that a) it does not take sufficient account of psychic realities and scientific knowledge, and b) it is based upon one symptom and so cannot validly be applied in all circumstances . . . The 'irresistible impulse' test is also inadequate, in that it gives no recognition to mental illnesses characterized by brooding and reflection ... A broader test should be adopted." The proposed test, already known as the "Durham Rule": a jury must decide 1) whether an accused was suffering from "a diseased or defective mental condition" when he committed the crime, and 2) if so, whether the crime was the "product" of such abnormality.

Psychiatrists and lawyers see major difficulties in this ruling, e.g., how to define such terms as "disease," "defect," "product." Many fear that it would be too easy for criminals to take refuge in "mental disease." Actually, if properly administered, the Durham rule would not necessarily have such results; in many cases, the defense would have a hard time proving a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the mental illness and the crime. The Durham rule, by allowing freer psychiatric testimony, might also undermine many defense attempts based on "irresistible impulse." which in the past has been responsible for some highly questionable acquittals. Said the Circuit Court's opinion: "Juries will continue to make moral judgments . . . But in making such judgments, they will be guided by wider horizons of knowledge concerning mental life."

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