Defence of Insanity: Its Scope and Application in English law

Abstract

English Law of Insanity proceeds in making assessments of the legal wrongfulness of an accused by fitting the circumstances within four slots established in line with M’Naghten case.During this process, the judges’ role becomes more robust than the jury as technical and medico legal issues are beyond the grasp of lay jury members.So we offered a critical appraisal of the approach adopted in English Law to fit the psychological science' in legal moulds through vast discretion vested in judges to deal with the defense of insanity. For this purpose, the authors extracted various pieces of information from case laws, books, law commission reports, Acts, statutes, and research articles published related to the subject matter and developed a synthesis to reach a conclusion. Our findings suggest the trial judge decides the extent and types of evidence to be induced for resolving the issues in contention regarding insanity and to be decided by the jury. Some issues pertaining to insanity are too difficult for the trial judge to decide, which requires expert evidence. The application of defense of insanity rests with the evaluation to see whether the judge's discretion has proved a right mechanism to plug medico legal gaps in this process or not.