Trials: Redefining Insanity

The jittery, harmless-looking little man in steel-rimmed spectacles was accused of murder, and he had long since confessed. Now, after four days of testimony and five hours of deliberation, the jurors had reached a verdict. They found the defendant, Howard Pierson, 49, not guilty by reason of insanity.

Thus last week in Austin, Texas, ended a murder trial that had been delayed for 28 years while the State of Texas waited, with inexhaustible patience, for Howard Pierson to recover his reason.

Pierson's belated acquittal was likely to contribute to a legal controversy that has raged for more than a century: What to do with the criminal who is not mentally responsible for his crime? Pierson had shot his father and mother one April night in 1935 and, after briefly protesting his innocence, he admitted the murders and his motive. His parents, he said, stood in the way of his plan to save mankind by means of a "cosmic-ray microscope" of his own conception. He showed no contrition.

Oversimplified. In dispensing justice in such cases, the law generally relies on a time-tested decision. In England in 1843, a Scotsman named Daniel M'Naghten, fancying some grievance against England's Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, shot and killed the Prime Minister's secretary by mistake. Fifteen British magistrates agreed that M'Naghten did not understand the "nature and quality" of his act—in short, could not tell right from wrong while committing the crime—and was therefore insane. Instead of going to the gallows, the daft Scot went to an asylum.

The M'Naghten Rule, as applied to the criminally insane, has guided the hand of justice ever since. But in increasing number, lawyers and judges are wondering whether justice needs a better guide. Says Psychiatrist Bernard L. Diamond, a member of a commission appointed by California Governor Pat Brown to study the state's criminal insanity laws: "A person who is so mentally ill that he doesn't understand right from wrong would be a drooling idiot incapable of action." In the last century, psychiatric medicine has amplified man's understanding of mental illness to such a degree that the M'Naghten Rule's oversimplified definition of insanity is scarcely any definition at all.

An enlightened age has set about redefining insanity for legal purposes, and can claim modest progress. In 1954, a Washington, D.C., killer named Monte Durham was declared not guilty, not because he could not distinguish right from wrong, but on the larger ground that a criminal should not be held cul pable if "his unlawful act is the product of a mental disease or defect." The so-called Durham Rule, or something like it, has since entered the law of several states (Maine, Vermont and Illinois). By necessity, such progress takes place at a deliberate pace, as the law weighs the possibility that any change in the criminal insanity codes may open inviting new escape hatches for the dedicated law breaker.