Criminal Justice: Doing in M'Naghten

There was little question that Narcotics Addict Charles Freeman had actually been pushing heroin. And it was hardly surprising that the court found him guilty—despite the defense contention that Freeman may have known that what he was doing was wrong, but had neither the capacity nor the will to be responsible for his acts. The judge was simply following a century-old precedent; he was applying the M'Naghten Rule, which holds that a man may be judged not responsible or insane only if he did not know what he was doing, or did not know that what he was doing was wrong. Nonetheless, in a decision that reflects a growing cooperation between the law and psychiatry, the three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed Freeman's conviction last week and ordered him retried. M'Naghten, said Justice Irving Kaufman for the unanimous three-man panel, is out of date.

In a lucid, 45-page decision replete with psychiatric, legal and historical scholarship, Kaufman suggested that M'Naghten has really been out of date since its formulation in 1843, when Daniel M'Naghten tried to assassinate British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel and killed his secretary instead. M'Naghten was so clearly out of his mind, said Kaufman, that his judges found him not guilty on the enlightened theory that his delusion of persecution by Peel had caused the act. The law's attitude toward insanity seemed to have taken an impressive leap forward.

Queen Victoria would have none of it. Distressed by a spate of assassination attempts (three on herself and one on her prince consort, Albert), she asked the House of Lords to review the case, said Kaufman. "With the Queen's hot breath on him," the presiding judge in M'Naghten's case reversed himself and applied the "right-wrong" standard.

Labels or Classifications. From then to now, Kaufman recalled, critics have complained that the narrowness of the test fails to include many obviously irresponsible people, and prevents psychiatrists from giving the court a complete picture of the accused—information that a jury should properly have if it is to judge a defendant's sanity. "Irresistible impulse" has become an additional ground for finding insanity in a few states, but impulse in practice has often had the effect of absolving "crimes of passion," not the coolly considered plots of equally insane men.

Then, in 1954, in the case of a Washington, D.C., housebreaker, Monte Durham, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals declared that a person is not criminally responsible if his "unlawful act was the product of mental disease or mental defect." This was a great deal broader than M'Naghten, said Kaufman, but it created new problems. Deciding whether an act is the "product" of a disease is difficult, perhaps impossible. Moreover, such terms as "mental disease and mental defect" give expert psychiatric witnesses a blank check. "It seems clear that a test which permits all to stand or fall upon the labels or classifications employed by testifying psychiatrists hardly affords the court the opportunity to perform its function of rendering an independent legal and social judgment."