The Insanity Defense in Retreat

Abstract

lieved that Peel's Tory Party was persecuting him; he was found guilty by reason of insanity. The law lords were asked to clarify grounds of defense and they ruled that no person was to be found guilty if at time of criminal act the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of mind, as not to know nature and quality of act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong. As psychiatry emerged in nineteenth century, critics of McNaughtan asserted that rule failed to acknowledge ways in which psychological factors could limit capacity for free will. Indeed, some, such as James Pritchard, argued that an apparently rational individual could suffer from moral insanity, for which inability to control criminal impulses was only symptom of abnormality. Despite these insistent challenges to rigidity of traditional criminal law,