9. Insanity and the Law
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, medicine as a whole was becoming more specialized and taking on the imprimatur of scientific ideas. Even in the psychiatric and neurological spheres, recent specializations, there was an aspiration to the exactitude of science and a search for physiological causes for mental disorder. Description and explanation grew a new density and complexity. A host of specialist books and journals appeared. Congresses brought together alienists from all over Europe and America to debate ideas and share research and methods of care. The size of asylums and the numbers considered insane kept pace with this growth, and indeed by the end of the century had outstripped even the profession’s ambitions.
Christiana’s case was one of several to bring a particular problem to the forefront: the legal understanding of insanity, the whole quagmire of what constituted ‘responsibility’, now rarely tallied with what was a more sophisticated and certainly more textured medical perception of mental and emotional states. Judging from responses in the press, many in Victorian England felt the doctors had humaneness on their side. The criminal law could be a blunt instrument in trials where madness was at issue. It was at once brutal and unforgiving. True, there was a tradition embedded in the common law that made executing an insane person palpably immoral. But how was a criminal court, with its jury of ordinary citizens who were no experts on the subject, to decide who was and who wasn’t insane?
The legal thinking on insanity, rehearsed by barristers and judge in Christiana Edmunds’s case, dates back to the great Lord Justice Hale (1609–76), who laid down the basis of English common law as it distinguished itself from the ecclesiastical courts. Hale was unequivocal in banning executions of the insane and is much cited, even in American courts today, for his precision in delineating all the separate times at which madness might set in during the lengthy trial process:
If a man in his sound memory commits a capital offence, and before his arraignment he becomes absolutely mad, he ought not by law to be arraigned during such his phrenzy, but be remitted to prison until that incapacity be removed ... If such person after his plea, and before his trial, become of non sane memory, he shall not be tried; or, if after his trial he become of non sane memory, he shall not receive judgment; or if after judgment he become of non sane memory, his execution shall be spared ...
A century later, Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9) repeated the prohibition on the execution of the insane, calling it ‘of extreme inhumanity and cruelty’. Insanity made a person ‘unfit to plead’. If ‘fit to plead’, but deemed insane at the time the criminal act was committed, the person was then acquitted on grounds of insanity.
The trouble the courts had was in arriving at an actual definition of insanity, and that ever-wavering dividing line between reason and madness. Blackstone noted that those who suffered from ‘a defect of understanding’ such as children, or a ‘deficiency of will’ such as lunatics, could not be held accountable for their own acts, not even for treason.
But how, except in the most obvious cases, were defects of understanding or deficiencies of will to be ascertained? Lord Justice Hale had made a distinction between absolute insanity and partial insanity. The latter described a person who had lucid periods during which understanding reigned: such people, say a ‘melancolic’, could be considered responsible for a shooting in a criminal court, but yet be stripped of responsibility over property in a civil case. As Henry Maudsley argued in his Responsibility in Mental Disease, a disparity had long existed between the criminal and civil law in the definition of insanity, and the bar needed to prove it in court. Partial insanity could in the civil courts deem a person incapable of having full management of himself, his property and his affairs. It would see him confined. But the same partial insanity in the criminal courts was not enough to shield him from full responsibility for any criminal act. Under this aegis, ‘it was right to hang for murder one who was not thought fit to take care of himself and his affairs’.
In that slow accrual of precedent that makes up English law, several key cases are repeatedly cited as crucial in defining insanity in the criminal courts. The first of these, given as precedent by Blackstone, is the 1723 trial of Edward Arnold who had shot at Lord Onslow in a country lane when the latter was returning from a hunting expedition. Arnold had never met Onslow, but felt he had been bewitched by him and believed him to be an enemy of the country, author of ‘tumults, disturbances, and confusions, and wicked devices’. In court, those who knew him attested that he was mad, but not mad enough to need confinement; that he was sometimes in, sometimes out of, his senses.
Mr Justice Tracy instructed the jurors that in order to acquit they had to decide whether the accused was totally insane. ‘It is not every kind of frantic humour, or something unaccountable in a man’s actions, that points him out to be such a madman as is exempted from punishment: it must be a man that is totally deprived of his understanding and memory, and doth not know what he is doing, no more than an infant, than a brute or a wild beast; such a one is never the object of punishment.’
This landmark trial gave the courts the so-called wild-beast test as the standard of insanity. Arnold, his delusion about Onslow apart, was not completely raving, and was convicted. He had not met the absolute insanity criteria. A death sentence awaited him, but Lord Onslow successfully urged his reprieve, and Arnold became a prisoner at Southwark jail where he lived on for another thirty years. Mercy, even for the partially mad, was gradually enshrined as a tradition.
Justice Tracy’s instruction to his jury clarified the law. Not guilty by reason of insanity was a possible verdict. But if insanity was only deemed partial – in other words the accused did not pass the wild- beast test and was not wholly deprived of understanding and memory – he would hang. Only at the turn of the century would a new understanding of what constituted criminal insanity come into play. This time the crime targeted the King himself.
On 15 May 1800, James Hadfield (or Hatfield), a soldier who had suffered severe head wounds, attempted to assassinate George III. His motive formed part of a delusion. He was convinced that only if he assassinated the King would he undergo judicial execution and be killed by the government of England, a fate that he was adamant would bring the second coming closer. While the national anthem played after a performance of Figaro at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, Hadfield took aim, fired two shots, and missed. Brought to trial for high treason, he was defended by the talented barrister Thomas Erskine, who put a new and subtler definition of madness into the casebooks.
Hadfield wasn’t insane in the terms of the wild-beast test: he was neither a dumb animal – that is, mentally disabled – nor a wild one, in a state of perpetual savage raving. This, Erskine argued, was far too simple a description of insanity: total deprivation of memory and understanding was very rare. ‘No such madness ever existed in the world.’ In the many cases that had filled Westminster Hall with complicated considerations, it was delusion on a particular subject which was the marker of insanity.
Insane persons ... have not only had the most perfect knowledge and recollection of all the relations they stood in towards others, and of the acts and circumstances of their lives, but had in general been remarkable for subtlety and acuteness; ... But the premises from which they reason, when within the range of the malady, are uniformly false: not false from any defect of knowledge or judgment, but because a delusive image, the inseparable companion of real insanity, is thrust upon the subjugated understanding, incapable of resistance, because unconscious of attack.
Hadfield, Erskine argued, not only knew right from wrong, but was conscious of the act he was committing and had manifested design and cunning in executing it. He fully expected to be punished, since that was his primary motive. Still, it was quite clear to everyone that he was mad. Delusion ‘unaccompanied by frenzy or raving madness’, Erskine argued, was the ‘true character of insanity’.
Erskine won his case. With his victory, a subtler definition of madness, one that allowed for ‘partial’ insanity and did not necessarily lead to a guilty verdict, came into the law. Since the prisoner had both to be treated humanely and have his condition recognized, but had also to be kept off the streets so that society could be kept secure, a new Criminal Lunatics Act (1800) was speedily passed through Parliament. Hitherto, the criminally mad were often sent into the ‘care’ of their families – as Mary Iamb had been by the coroner after killing her mother – rather than institutionalized by law. With the 1800 Act in place, Hadfield could be detained indefinitely ‘at His Majesty’s pleasure’ – a period which usually constituted a life sentence, though it could, if a reviewing body saw fit, mean eventual release. Eight years later, the County Asylums Act 1808 established institutions for the criminally insane, of which the first opened in Northampton in 1811.
Maudsley, in his Responsibility in Mental Disease, argues that the Hadfield trial – though it marked, thanks to Erskine’s eloquent pleading, a victory of ‘common sense over legal dogma’ – did not definitively succeed in bringing forward ‘a judicial adoption of delusion in place of the old criterion of responsibility’. He cites the Bellingham case of 1812 as an example.
In this complex case, Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was shot as he was making his way through the lobby of the House of Commons to the Chamber by John Bellingham, a man who had worked for a merchant in Russia, had been imprisoned there for five years, in both Archangel and St Petersburg, though he continually protested his innocence of the charge of fraud and of non-payment of a debt. Finally released through ambassadorial intervention, Bellingham sought compensation when he returned to Britain in 1809. It wasn’t forthcoming, and he took his grievance ever higher, finally arriving at the Treasury. He wrote to the Treasury stating that ‘I consider His Majesty’s Government to have completely endeavoured to close the door of justice, in declining to have, or even permit, my grievances to be brought before Parliament for redress, which privilege is the birthright of every individual’. If his reasonable request were denied, Bellingham went on, ‘I shall then feel justified in executing justice myself... ’
On 11 May 1812, he did so. He was tried for murder four days later before Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of Common Pleas. Bellingham justified his action; his counsel, entering an insanity plea, asked for a postponement so that evidence of Bellingham’s insanity from people who knew him in Liverpool could be put before the court. It was refused, a fact which pleased Bellingham who, like many of those confronted with an insanity defence, did not think himself insane. Indeed, he had proceeded with great logic, procuring two guns and ammunition and making a prior visit to the Commons. The judicial reasoning that postponement was refused was that Bellingham had been living in London for some time before the assassination with no visible signs of insanity, and any family testimony produced would not relate to his current condition. A verdict of guilty was brought in and on Monday 18 May, only a week after the assassination, he was hanged.
In his statement to the jury, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield described the state of the law on insanity until that time. He drew attention to the distinction between partial and total insanity but, significantly, he never once referred to Erskine’s stunning argument about ‘delusion’. There were no specialist medical alienists to refute him to hand.
There are various species of insanity. Some human creatures are void of all power of reasoning from their birth, such could not be guilty of any crime. There is another species of madness in which persons were subject to temporary paroxysms, in which they were guilty of acts of extravagance – this was called Lunacy. If these persons committed a crime when they were not affected with the malady, they were to all intents and purposes amenable to justice. So long as they can distinguish good from evil, so long are they answerable for their conduct. There is a third species of insanity, in which the patient fancied the existence of injury, and sought an opportunity of gratifying revenge, by some hostile act; if such a person was capable, in other respects, of distinguishing right from wrong, there is no excuse for any act of atrocity which he might commit under this description of derangement . . . The single question is, whether at the time this act was committed, he [Bellingham] possessed a sufficient degree of understanding to distinguish good from evil, right from wrong.
In the heated atmosphere of a prime-ministerial assassination, it is perhaps unsurprising that Bellingham was convicted. But some, notably Henry Brougham, an advocate of legal reform, were deeply critical. Bellingham had been tried with undue haste and in a climate that was inimical to justice, he argued: not enough time or attention had been paid to the insanity plea.
In Dr Henry Maudsley’s analysis, some sixty-two years and a great deal of mind-doctoring activity later, what had happened was that the old wild-beast test of insanity and criminal responsibility had mutated, with Bellingham, into a test of whether the accused had the power of distinguishing right from wrong in a general way, even if not where his own crime was concerned. In Maudsley’s view, many of the ‘insane’ had little trouble with abstract principles of right and wrong, but they were blind when it came to their own mad delusions.
Indeed, the logic of retributive justice that Bellingham himself presented to the court was impeccable, though it had led to murder. Underlying many of the murderous crimes committed by otherwise seemingly reasonable people is the sense that they are impelled to act in order to restore justice. The fact that others find their analysis of the ‘real’ bizarre, or are incapable of sharing their reality, is in fact what constitutes their madness. Bellingham’s own address to the court could stand in for what many other accused feel: ‘Gentlemen, a refusal of justice was the sole cause of this fatal catastrophe ... I was driven to despair and under those agonised feelings I was impelled to that desperate alternative which I unfortunately adopted.’
Bellingham concludes his defence like some political radical driven to direct action: ‘... what is my crime to the crime of government itself? It is no more than a mite to a mountain, unless it was proved that I had malice propense towards the unfortunate gentleman for whose death I am now upon trial. I disclaim all personal or intentional malice against Mr Perceval.’
In this vein it could be said of Christiana Edmunds that she found herself impelled to lift a hand with a poisoned chocolate in it to the mouth of the woman who stood in the way of her obtaining ‘justice’ in the form of Charles Beard’s ‘promised’ love; when it didn’t come, she was driven to the ‘desperate alternative’ of broadcasting her poison, but with no ‘intentional malice’ of killing Sidney Barker.
The M’Naghten case of 1843 introduced a new degree of subtlety into the understanding of legal insanity and became the model for all cases of criminal responsibility in Anglo-American and commonwealth law, including India.
Daniel M’Naghten (1813–65) was the illegitimate son of a Scottish woodturner. According to the great advocate who defended him, Alexander Cockburn, later to be the leading jurist in the Isabella Robinson case, M’Naghten was a man of sober habits and ‘of singularly sensitive mind [who] spent his days in incessant labour and toil, and at night gave himself up to the study of difficult and abstruse matters’. After a period as a journeyman when his father would not accept him as a partner, he went on to run his own business in Glasgow, using his free time to attend the Glasgow Mechanics’ Institute and a debating society. Late in 1840, already prey to a sense ‘that persons persecuted him’ and suffering from torturing headaches, he sold this lucrative enterprise. Why? – because ‘the fearful phantasms of his own imagination rendered his existence miserable’ and ‘these terrifying delusions had become associated with the place of his abode haunting him at all hours of day and night’.
M’Naghten travelled to England and France, but he couldn’t escape his persecutors, and late in 1841 he returned to Glasgow. He acted, according to Cockburn, as a sane man would act: he went to the authorities of
his native place, to those who could afford him protection, and ‘with clamours, entreats and implores them to defend him from the conspiracy’ that was affecting his happiness and his whole life. But when M’Naghten told his father and the Glasgow police commissioner that he was being persecuted by the Tories and followed by their spies, they only tried to dissuade, and provided no help. So on the afternoon of 20 January 1843, M’Naghten approached Prime Minister Robert Peel’s private secretary, Edward Drummond, who had just emerged from the Prime Minister’s house, and shot him from behind at point-blank range. It is probable that he thought he was aiming at the Prime Minister. He was quickly apprehended and didn’t resist arrest. Sadly, Drummond died five days later, having been bled by incompetent doctors.
At London’s Bow Street magistrates’ court the following morning, M’Naghten’s statement repeated what he had earlier told his father:
The Tories in my native city have compelled me to do this. They follow me and persecute me wherever I go and have entirely destroyed my peace of mind. They followed me to France, into Scotland and all over England; in fact, they follow me wherever I go. I can get no rest from them night or day. I cannot sleep at night in consequence of the course they pursue towards me. I believe they have driven me into a consumption. I am sure I shall never be the man I formerly was. I used to have good health and strength, but I have not now. They have accused me of crimes of which I am not guilty; they do everything in their power to harass and persecute me; in fact they wish to murder me. It can be proved by evidence; that’s all I have to say.
The trial began on 3 March 1843, since the defence had been granted time to call in evidence from Scotland and perhaps France. The prosecution tried to place the attempt on the Prime Minister’s life in the context of the ongoing furore around the protectionist Corn Laws which kept food prices high. The Solicitor General, Sir William Webb Follett, argued in a restrained opening that despite what might be M’Naghten’s ‘partial insanity’, his morbid delusion of mind upon some subjects, it was not enough to deflect responsibility ‘if he had that degree of intellect which enabled him to know and distinguish between right and wrong; if he knew what would be the effects of his crime and consciously committed it, and if with that consciousness he wilfully committed it’.
Trials of Passion Page 10
