Lesion of the will: medical resolve and criminal responsibility in Victorian Insanity Trials

TLDR: Analysis of courtroom testimony heard in London's Central Criminal Court in the 10 years following the McNaughtan acquittal (1843) reveals the effort of medical witnesses to establish a distinctive and essential voice in the Victorian insanity trial.

Abstract: Analysis of courtroom testimony heard in London's Central Criminal Court in the 10 years following the McNaughtan acquittal (1843) reveals the effort of medical witnesses to establish a distinctive and essential voice in the Victorian insanity trial. Three trials that illustrate this effort are examined for the manner in which practitioners of mental medicine distinguished their opinion from the layperson's fact and, in the process, engaged pivotal issues for the determination of criminal responsibility. Their testimony and the attorneys' questions that elicited it suggest that whatever reliance the judiciary might have placed on the McNaughtan Rules to confine testimony to the defendant's capacity to "know fight from wrong," medical witnesses devised ways to circumvent and indeed dismiss the relevance of this particular inquiry. he difference between asking a witness, "Did the boy not tell you something about his grandfather?" and "Do you consider when he did this, he did not know that poisoning his grandfather was a wrong act?" is the difference between asking a witness to report a fact and asking him to deliver an opinion. Although all witnesses in Anglo-American jurisprudence are ostensibly limited to reporting only their direct sensory perceptions to the court, there exists a class of witnesses entitled to draw inferences, form opinions, and advise the jury in matters thought to be beyond the ken of the ordinary citizen. The only skill required to answer the first question is the possession of auditory sensation: What was it the witness actually heard?1 The second question asks for the most subtle of judgments: an opinion that the defendant could commit an atrocious crime without knowing that committing it would be wrong. What does the phrasing of this question-and indeed the fact that it was asked at all-suggest about the common law's willingness to entertain a body of opinion that claimed unique insight into the mind of the mad? Both questions cited above are found in an 1848 insanity trial heard at the Old Bailey, London's Central Criminal Court. That a self-proclaimed expert in mental medicine appeared in court to answer questions about mental derangement was not a novel occurrence. Physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries had been appearing in English courts to comment on the medical features of insanity since at least 1760. And it was hardly unusual for the defendant's mental derangement to be associated with physical pathology, as would be the case with the youthful poisoner. Neighbors, lovers, and co-workers of the allegedly insane routinely commented on physiological anomalies ranging from head wounds to fevers, war wounds to riding accidents, head sores to fits. What would set mid-Victorian insanity trials apart was the medical witness's venturing into the moral consequence of such physical ailments. In the case cited above, the young defendant's ringworm had purportedly penetrated his brain, not only driving him mad but "prevent[ing] him from distinguishing right from wrong." To be sure, laypersons were in the habit of associating physical anomalies with aberrant behavior, but they confined their testimony to the presence of insanity. The emerging specialist in mental medicine, in contrast, endeavored to construct a more ambitious connection, one that speculated on the implications of physical and moral lesions for the mental contemplation of a crime. This effort to delve into the mental consequence of disease was one way the medical specialist distinguished his testimony from the layperson's. A second, and more consequential, undertaking was his challenge of the juror's belief that there was anything self-evident in discovering madness. By questioning the conventional signs and assumed meanings of bizarre action, the medical witness presented a construction of nonintentional behavior that would eventually bring him into direct conflict with the law's criterion for assigning criminal responsibility. …