Crime -- United States; Criminal justice, Administration of -- United States; Criminals -- United States
The new test to determine responsibility will recognize, as does the
law of Germany, that there can be no criminal act where the free
determination of the will is excluded by disease, and that the capacity
to distinguish between right and wrong is inconclusive. It may
perhaps have to take a general form, leaving it to a lay, or a mixed
lay-and-expert jury to say merely whether the accused had a disease
of the mind of a type recognized by science, and whether the alleged
criminal act was of such a character as would naturally flow from that
type of insanity, in which case it would seem obviously just to regard
the defendant as partially irresponsible, and perhaps entirely so.
Possibly the practical needs of the moment might be met by permitting
such a jury to determine whether the defendant had such a knowledge of
the wrongful nature and consequences of his act and such a control over
his will as to be a proper subject of punishment.* This would require
the jury to find that the defendant had some knowledge of right and
wrong and the power to choose between them. In any event, to render
the accused entirely irresponsible, his act should arise out of and
be caused solely by the diseased condition of his mind. The law, while
asserting the responsibility of many insane people, should recognize
"partial" responsibility as well.
*See State vs. Richards, 1873, Conn.
The reader may feel that little after all would be gained, but he will
observe that at any rate such a test, however imperfect, would permit
juries to do lawfully that which they now do by violating their oaths.
The writer believes that the best concrete test yet formulated and
applied by any court is that laid down in Parsons vs. The State of
Alabama (81 Ala., 577):
"1. Was the defendant at the time of the commission of the alleged
crime, as matter of fact, afflicted with a disease of the mind, so as to
be either idiotic, or otherwise insane?
"2. If such be the case, did he know right from wrong as applied to the
particular act in question? If he did not have such knowledge, he is not
legally responsible.
"3. If he did have such knowledge, he may nevertheless not be legally
responsible if the two following conditions concur:
"(1) If, by reason of the duress of such mental disease, he had so far
lost the power to choose between the right and wrong, and to avoid doing
the act in question, as that his free agency was at the time destroyed.
"(2) And if, at the same time, the alleged crime was so connected with
such mental disease, in the relation of cause and effect, as to have
been the product of it solely."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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