INSANITY AND RESPONSIBILITY.
THE discussion as to the kinti of evidence of Insanity which ought to exempt from legal responsibility for crime, would be more instructive than it is, if either the medical men or the lawyers would but recognise fully that at best all we can attain in these cases is a more or less reasonable 'presumption as to whether the criminal committed the crime under the influence of entirely exceptional constraining causes impelling him thereto, or whether he had no more than a normal amount of inducement and no less than a normal amount of dissuasion acting upon him. It seems to us that this is the only real point in these cases to be cleared up. When the lawyers press, with Mr. Justice Brett,—in Blampied's case, as reported in last Saturday's Times,—the old legal doctrine on the subject, that you must show, in order to exonerate a criminal from legal responsibility, that he was suffering under a mental derangement which misled him either as to the specific nature of the act he was doing, or as to its being a wrong action, of course you are likely enough to fail with a jury, who are much too impervious to mere legal doctrine not to open their minds to the possibility of a kind of insanity which could not be thus described, and yet would put the person suffering from it in a totally different moral position from the rest of mankind. No lawyer would deny for a moment that a man whose arm was forcibly used by another as the mechanical instrument of committing murder would be just as innocent of that murder, as the gunsmith who had made a gun which a murderer had subsequently used for purposes of assassination. Yet the man whose arm was forcibly used for the commission of a murder might fully know the nature of the act committed, and that it was wrong. If, therefore, there be any affection of the brain, as many of the physicians who have studied this subject believe that there is, which leaves the in- tellectual conception of the crime and of its wickedness unaltered, but deprives the patient of his power of self-restraint, or super- sedes the power of self-restraint by a positive frenzy of involun- tary passion, such a person would be just as innocent of the crime as the person whose arm was involuntarily used by a mur- derer for the commission of a crime. This the jury in Blam- pied's case saw so clearly, that Mr. Justice Brett's vehement legal directions on the subject failed to impress them. They listened to the Judge, and assured him that they had followed his legal directions in the verdict of acquittal on the ground of insanity, which they gave. But it was obvious that so far from following his directions, they had expressly ignored them. And possibly they were right. The legal doctrine on the subject is intrinsically unreasonable. There is no good ground at all why, in discussing the question of responsibility, we should have more regard for the intellectual than for the voluntary element of mental derangement. Of course presumptive evidence is all we can get at in either case. But just as adequate presumptive evidence might be given of de- lirious impulses as of delirious ideas. Suppose a patient in high fever were to spring from his bed and murder his nurse ; it is quite conceivable that there might be complete evidence to show that he did it with full consciousness both of the nature of the act com- mitted and of its wickedness. It might be shown from his conversa- tion that he clearly contemplated the deed and its consequence, and that he was full of anticipations of misery and of punishment at the very moment he committed the act ; yet no jury in their senses would find such a delirious patient guilty of murder. The mere fact that his pulse was at the time 120, and his blood at a temperature of 5° or 6° above that of health, would be ample proof to all practical men that the man was under such totally different physical conditions from those of ordinary men, as to be exempt from the ordinary law of responsibility. Now it is, we take it, undeniable that there are other morbid conditions of the brain quite as abnormal and unfavourable to mental health as high fever, and which are quite as likely to result in crime. It seems to us, then, simply childish, in the face of such medical cer- tainties as these, to lay down cavalierly, with Mr. Justice Brett, the old, imperfect legal doctrine, and expect juries to be guided im- plicitly by it. Common-sense tells us that this old legal doctrine was conceived in the infancy of medical science, and is not adapted to our completer knowledge of the nature of brain-disease. If it can be shown on reasonable evidence that a man is subject to maniacal attacks which do not affect his intellectual and moral perceptions, he is just as much thereby removed from the condi- tions under which we estimate ordinary guilt, as if his intellectual and moral perceptions had been distorted by his disease, but no insane impulses had been implanted. The lawyers may impose unreasonable doctrine on juries as often as they like, but it is clear that juries will not mould their verdicts by it, so long as it continues ostentatiously inconsistent with the facts of medical science.
On the other hand, the Doctors seem to us to exercise a most dangerous influence on the principles on which this question of legal responsibility in the insane is determined, when they give, as they so often have done lately, arbitrary opinions, founded as much on their own consciousness as on anything else, that particular acts of themselves imply an insanity which ought to exempt those who commit them from legal responsibility for their crimes. As far as we could see, the action taken by the medical profession in Christina Edmunds's case and in Mr. Watson's case was of this nature. Eminent doctors went down and talked to the crimi- nals; elicited from their relatives that there had been an insane uncle or aunt in the family, that the conduct of the criminal had been eccentric at different times,—possibly they discovered, in addition, some fancied malformation of the brain,—and then they gave a merciful certificate that the criminal was of unsound mind, without much considering the disastrous consequences of this sort of easy dealing with moral probabilities. We have, of course, no means of knowing whether the medical opinion expressed in the case of Murphy, who was reprieved last Monday for the murder of a boy, was founded on any evidence of insanity outside the murderous act itself ;—indeed one of the mischiefs of these medical interpositions is, that the public seldom have any means of knowing the grounds of the arbitrary medical opinions expressed ;—but this is clear, that if medical men do not go beyond conjectures founded on the particular criminal act in question, or go beyond them only so far as to permit their minds to be influenced by hearing that other members of the family have been insane, they carry the doctrine of irresponsibility as much beyond what is reasonable, as the old judicial authorities fell short of reason in the principle laid down by Mr. Justice Brett. All conceivable evidence of mental irresponsibility is of a purely presumptive nature. The obvious and right rule is to hold a man responsible for a crime until good presumptive evidence can be produced to the contrary, for if this is not to be so, there is hardly a criminal anywhere who might not evade punishment by producing some kind of evidence of eccentricity and of kinship with insane persons. Where is the family which could not somewhere or other find its highly eccentric or insane member? Where is the man or woman who has never been deeded in eccentricities or passionate outbursts which, judicioualy, used, mightbe made to throw doubts on his or her moral responsi- bility? It is of the first possible importance to the community that we should not allow criminals to get off easily under a show of insanity. It would no doubt be very unfortunate if we were frequently to inflict ignominious punishments on persons whom the majority of the people believe to be insane ;—for that would injure the public self-respect, and also diminish the loathing and the shame with which such crimes are regarded. But it would be still more unfortunate if many guilty people were generally believed to escape punishment under the pretext of insanity, for that would open to all criminally- disposed persons the prospect of escape, and gravely diminish the deterrent effect of the punishment itself. Physicians should recognise, as lawyers should recognise, that all we can possibly obtain on these subjects is fair presumptive evidence of the abnormal conditions of the supposed lunatic's brain and mind ; and in the absence of such substantial evidence we ought to con- sider him guilty, and punish him as if be were guilty. In Blana- pied's case there was at least absolute evidence that he had been insane some three or four years ago, and insane for some time, and also that more recently he had had attacks of giddiness which would be not unlikely to cause a return of the old disease, if it had not been quite eradicated. There, at least, was presumptive evidence of the right kind,—whether adequate or inadequate in quantity, we do not pretend to say,—but still of the kind tending to suggest that the murderous act, if it did not originate in a diseased brain, was probably so far affected by it as to remove the criminal out of the category of ordinary human agents. Was there any external evidence of the same kind in Murphy's case?. None such was, we believe, produced at the trial, and if the medical men, on whose certificate Murphy has been reprieved, have discovered it since, we think the public ought to have been in- formed: For if these medical authorities formed their judgment only on the apparently motiveless character of Murphy's murder of the boy, they would, we contend, be reversing the true rule, which should be to presume guilt until independent evidence of insanity from other sources could be produced. Medical men have no more power of divination in these cases than other men. Indeed, they are so accustomed to look at these cases from one point of view, to assume a diseased brain, and to regard physical causes as the-sources of mental peculiarities, that hardly one medical man in ten will see adequately the other side of the case,—namely, the great ease of getting up a show of similar presumptions in favour of the insanity of any person whatever whom it might be desirable to prove irresponsible for a particular action. In the exercise of their profession medical men do not see the normal phenomena of the brain, but only the extraordinary. Now, if they had submitted to them in the same way, and with the same motive for making out a case of irresponsibility, the act of any man of sharp temper or sensitive disposition or genius,—say, for instance, Mr. Burke's production of a dagger in the House of Commons, or Mr. Whalley's various outbursts, or the late Mr. Mitchell's or Mr. Martin's Home-rule invectives,—they would be quite sure to declare these gentlemen insane, and to do so with quite as much certainty as they could possibly have felt when they gave some of the certificates of insanity of which we have heard within the last few years. The medical profession ought to be made to see, much more clearly than they do, that what is needed is not a hypothesis which will account plausibly for a few of the facts, but a hypothesis which will account for all the known facts better than any other, and which will not render it easy to get rid of the responsibility for crime on the mere evidence of the act of crime itself.
At the best we can only make a shrewd guess at these questions of responsibility. For anything we know, many men who seem responsible for their crimes are not really so responsible;— their education may be responsible for these crimes, and not the men themselves. For anything we know, again, many men who do• not seem responsible for their crimes, really are so. It is only a.reasonable presumption we can reach at the best. But if that presumption is to be founded solely or chiefly on the crimi- nal-act itself, there is an end at once of all chance of intimidating unprofessional and exceptional criminals. They will always be able-to -count on escaping the consequences of their crime by the, help of: the apparent eccentricity of it, and the favour- of the doctors. Nothing ean be more dangerous. We confess to the deepest distrust of professional medical opinions on this subject, if only for the reason we have named, that the experience of medical men is limited so much to cases of diseased brain, that their- imagination and their memory are dominated by the pre- cedents of- physical disease till they can hardly be said to have any opportunity of a really. impartial judgment. If they have- thoroughly broken down the obsolete and quite, untenable legal doctrine on the subject, they have set up precedents of their own which are still more dangerous and, still less reasonable on the. other side. The public must beware of professional bias on this subject, whether legal or medical. For this is eminently a subject where the evidence of specialists may be useful, but the judgment of specialists is .utterly untrustworthy.
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