The insanity defense: new calls for reform.

Abstract

IThe perennial problem of the insanity defense is front-page news once again. Two apparently unmotivated attacks on prominent public figures-former Beatle John Lennon and President Ronald Reaganboth carried out by young drifters with psychiatric histories, have resurrected public fears that our legal system is incapable of coping with the criminal acts of the mentally ill (1). In response to the public’s concerns, the U.S. Attorney General’s Task Force on Violent Crime has recommended a partial restructuring of the system for trying mentally ill offenders (2). Others have called for more radical moves, such as the outright abolition of the insanity defense (1). What are the roots of this widespread ferment, with its often contradictory calls for reform? Although currently much maligned, the idea that a mentally ill individual, under certain circumstances, ought not to be held responsible for his criminal acts reflects a long-standing tradition in Anglo-American law. More than 800 years ago the doctrine of mens rea first entered the English legal system (3). Simply put, the doctrine holds that the ability to form a criminal intent-or to manifest a “guilty mind”-is an inherent element ofany offense. Thus, before a defendant can be declared guilty of having violated the law, the court must take into account not only what he did but also some aspects of why he did it. Mens rea first appeared in English common law in connection with the crime of perjury, but over the centuries it began to be applied to a wider variety of acts, according to a bewildering profusion of formulas. Three of those formulas form the basis for the tests of criminal nonresponsibility in most jurisdictions in the United States today. The M’Naghten Rule, derived from an 1843 English prosecution of a psychotic man who attempted to murder the prime minister and shot the prime minister’s secretary instead, relieves a person of responsibility for his acts if he was “laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing,