The Insanity Plea

New knowledge of mental diseases clearly outdates old legal definitions of insanity. But courts and legislatures have been slow to make changes. Still in common use is the 118-year-old British-devised M'Naghten Rule, under which the accused must stand trial and face punishment if 1) he knew what he was doing when he did it and 2) knew right from wrong. Modern psychiatry's major try at an improvement is the Durham Rule,* under which the accused is spared trial and possible punishment if, at the time of the crime, he was suffering from a "mental disease or mental defect," and the crime was the "product" of that condition.

Last week Maine's Governor John H. Reed signed a bill that made his state the first to adopt the Durham Rule. Ironically, pioneer New England Psychiatrist Isaac Ray, while living in Maine, proposed an almost identical rule in 1838--five years before the House of Lords laid down the vexed M'Naghten Rule. New Hampshire adopted Dr. Ray's rule in 1870. The Durham Rule is the Ray Rule in up-to-date language.

The chief merit claimed for the new rule is that it forces judges and jurors to recognize various kinds of neuroses and psychoses and then to decide whether the disease helped cause the crime. More lawbreakers may thus escape criminal punishment; in Washington, D.C., since the Durham Rule was introduced, the rate of successful pleas of mental illness has increased sharply, and one in four is successful.

* Named for a small-time Washington robber and housebreaker and propounded for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia in 1954 by Judge David L. Bazelon.

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