Criminal Lunatics Research Articles

George Stephen Penny (1885-1964): his life and medical encounters before, during and after admission to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

Amid extensive press coverage, George Stephen Penny (1885-1964) was tried for murder in 1923. He was found 'guilty but insane' due to 'confusional insanity' associated with malaria which he suffered during World War I. Penny was admitted to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum at a time of great public concern about inadequate and cruel care in mental institutions, but he was treated with humanity and respect. Penny's story also reveals much about challenges of psychiatric diagnosis and the relationships between crime, insanity, the public, lawyers and the medical profession. Following discharge from Broadmoor, Penny built himself a life in the community. His pseudonymous memoir, with masterly concealment of his identity and crime, tells his story up to 1925.

'Malaria Has Spoilt It': Malaria, Neuropsychiatric Complications, and Insanity in ex-Servicemen in Post-First World War Britain.

This article focuses on the cases of two British ex-servicemen who contracted malaria during or immediately after the First World War, were charged with murder in the 1920s, and pled insanity due to their malaria and long-term neuropsychiatric complications. One was found 'guilty but insane' and committed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in June 1923, while the other was convicted and hanged in July 1927. It argues that, at a time when the medical community sought out the causes of mental disease in the physical body, medico-legal arguments about malaria and insanity were received inconsistently by inter-war British courts. Class, education, social status, institutional support and the nature of the crime all mattered, as they had in the diagnoses, treatment and trials of other ex-servicemen with psychiatric illnesses.

John Russell Reynolds

When neurology began to develop as a specialty, Russell Reynolds was one of the first neurologists appointed to the Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, Queen Square. Of many contributions his work on epilepsy was influential, espousing many new concepts. He followed and developed Hughlings Jackson’s original ideas about positive and negative neurological symptoms. His approach to patients was holistic at a time when more objectively defined notions of illness dominated medicine. He wrote on vertigo, and about criminal lunacy, and his book The Diagnosis of Diseases of the Brain, Spinal Cord, Nerves and their appendages was a major text of the period. Well versed in poetry, philosophy, art, and music, he was widely admired. He became President of the Royal College of Physicians.

Broadmoor's Early ‘Pleasure Women’, or the Somatechnics of Maternal Filicide in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain

Drawing on primary and secondary sources including Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum patient files (specifically for the years 1863–1874), trial notes, newspaper reports, medical treatises, parliamentary debates, government reports, and juridical texts, this paper offers a critical genealogy of what we identify as the key somatechnologies that contributed to the gathering together, for the first time in British history, of a large number of women who murdered (or attempted to murder) their offspring in a purpose-built asylum for the criminally insane. Our analysis offers a (necessarily partial) mapping of the dispositif – that is, the ‘thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble … of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions' ( Foucault 1980b : 194) – that we contend engendered a culturally- and historically-specific configuration of the maternal filicide that thoroughly saturated the lives of women on whom this study is based.

LIFE FOR THE FAMILIES OF THE VICTORIAN CRIMINALLY INSANE

AbstractThis article uses hundreds of letters written by the families of patients committed to Victorian Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum to provide the first sustained examination of the effects of asylum committal on patients’ individual family members. It shows that, despite what historians have previously suggested, the effect on families was not solely, or even necessarily primarily, economic; it had significant emotional effects, and affected family members’ sense of self and relationships outside the asylum. It also shows that family ties and affective relationships mattered a great deal to working-class Victorians. Some found new ways to give meaning to their relationship with, and the life of, their incarcerated relative, despite the costs this entailed. By taking a new approach – engaging with the history of the family, shifting focus from patients to their individual family members, and considering factors including age, class, gender, change over time, and life stage – this article demonstrates the breadth and depth of the effects of asylum committal, and in doing so provides new and significant insights into the history of the Victorian asylum. It also enriches the history of the family by providing an insight into working-class quotidian lives, bonds, and emotions.

The Case of Styllou Christofi: Criminal Insanity As a Defense In Court [University of Central Oklahoma

Criminal insanity as a defense continues to be an expulatory plea. The law enforcement and the courts in London have dealt with information reported regarding violent people during 1954. It focuses on the case of Christofi Styllou and her crime committed in 1952, her incarceration from 1952 through her trial, and execution in 1954. The research for this project focuses on court rulings relating to the determination of behaviors, either identified as understanding the difference between having a psychological disorder or defined as criminally insane. In the U.S., the Durham Rule applies, which means that a jury could determine whether the defendant had a mental diagnosis, or whether he or she could be charged guilty by insanity. This precedent does not apply to the UK. Nonetheless, in the U.K., multiple acts of legislation relating to criminal insanity passed between 1800 and 1954. Three vital legislative acts passed before the Christofi hearings, including the Capital Punishment Act of 1868, Criminal Lunacy Act of 1884 section 2 (4), and the Mental Deficiency Act 1913

Incarcerating the insane: debating responsibility for criminal lunatics between prisons, hospitals, and families in British mandate Palestine

ABSTRACTAlthough much has been written about counterinsurgency, policing, and incarceration under the British mandate in Palestine, little work has been done on those who entered the ambit of the carceral system as ‘criminal lunatics’. Criminal lunatics – the term used at the time to specifically designate those found ‘guilty but insane’ by the mandate’s criminal courts, and retained throughout this article both for the sake of analytic clarity and to avoid misdiagnosing individuals by the retrospective imposition of contemporary medical terms – confounded the mandatory government by potentially falling under the responsibility of both its criminal-legal and medical wings. While the focus in the wider scholarship on psychiatry has often been on its expansionist appetites, the struggle over responsibility for criminal lunatics in mandate Palestine offers a case study in the reverse; an attempt to abdicate, not aggrandise, as the health department staved off repeated efforts to make them take responsibility for these cases. This article traces these disputes, and the development of a distinct institutional landscape attendant on their outcome. But the fate of criminal lunatics was not merely determined by debates internal to government; families were important interlocutors too, who variously sought the release of their incarcerated mentally ill relatives, or – more worryingly for the mandate – exploited the criminal-legal system as a back-door to the overcrowded and underfunded government mental institutions. Far from seeing psychiatry as a tool of social control, the government expressed concern about the potential misuse of psychiatric ideas, processes, and institutions by Palestinian families as a way to escape obligations to mentally ill relatives. Foregrounding these fraught contestations brings into focus the sharp limits of the mandate’s ambitions in the sphere of the intimate, and the attempts of some Palestinians to expand those limits for their own ends.

The Pathologisation of Women Who Kill: Three Cases from Ireland

Summary Women who kill are frequently subject to discourses of pathology. This article examines the cases of three women convicted of murder in Ireland following Independence in 1922 and explores how each woman was constructed as pathologised. Using archival materials, the article demonstrates that diagnoses were contingent and imbricated with notions of gender, morality, dangerousness, and class. For two of the women, their pathologisation led to them being certified as insane and admitted to the Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum. However, pathologisation could be mediated by respectable femininity. The article also explores the pathways which facilitated judgements of pathology, including the acceptance of a framework of degeneracy, or hereditary insanity, and examines how women could be redeemed from the diagnoses of ‘insanity’.

'I am very glad and cheered when I hear the flute': TheTreatment of Criminal Lunatics in Late Victorian Broadmoor.

Through an examination of previously unseen archival records, including patients’ letters, this article examines the treatment and experiences of patients in late Victorian Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum and stakes the place of this institution within the broader history of therapeutic regimes in British asylums. Two main arguments are put forth. The first relates to the evolution of treatment in Victorian asylums. Historians tend to agree that in the 1860s and 1870s ‘psychiatric pessimism’ took hold, as the optimism that had accompanied the growth of moral treatment, along with its promise of a cure for insanity, abated. It has hitherto been taken for granted that all asylums reflected this change. I question this assumption by showing that Broadmoor did not sit neatly within this framework. Rather, the continued emphasis on work, leisure and kindness privileged at this institution into the late Victorian period was often welcomed positively by patients and physicians alike. Second, I show that, in Broadmoor’s case, moral treatment was determined not so much by the distinction between the sexes as the two different classes of patients – Queen’s pleasure patients and insane convicts – in the asylum. This distinction between patients not only led to different modes of treatment within Broadmoor, but had an impact on patients’ asylum experiences. The privileged access to patients’ letters that the Broadmoor records provide not only offers a new perspective on the evolution of treatment in Victorian asylums, but also reveals the rarely accessible views of asylum patients and their families on asylum care.

'I am not very well I feel nearly mad when I think of you': Male Jealousy, Murder and Broadmoor in Late-Victorian Britain.

This article compares the representations of jealousy in popular culture, medical and legal literature, and in the trials and diagnoses of men who murdered or attempted to murder their wives or sweethearts before being found insane and committed into Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum between 1864 and 1900. It is shown that jealousy was entrenched in Victorian culture, but marginalised in medical and legal discourse and in the courtroom until the end of the period, and was seemingly cast aside at Broadmoor. As well as providing a detailed examination of varied representations of male jealousy in late-Victorian Britain, the article contributes to understandings of the emotional lives of the working-class, and the causes and representations of working-class male madness.

The interface between general and forensic psychiatry: a historical perspective

SummaryMental disorder and criminality are separate entities but some people with a mental disorder commit criminal offences and some criminals have a mental disorder. Before 1800 there was no separate category of mentally disordered offenders (referred to as criminal lunatics until 1948) in UK legislation. The provision of facilities for mentally disordered offenders in Britain and Ireland overlapped with, but was also separate from, provision for the mentally ill generally. The interface between general and forensic psychiatry is an area of tension and of collaboration. To understand how contemporary general and forensic psychiatry interact, it is useful to have an understanding of how factors have evolved overtime.Learning Objectives•Have an understanding of the evolution of general and forensic psychiatry in the UK over the past 200 years.•Comprehend the similarities and differences between general and forensic psychiatry.•Be aware of some of the roots of conflict between general and forensic psychiatry.

‘One of the Best Fathers until He Went Out of His Mind’: Paternal Child-Murder, 1864–1900

Current scholarship suggests that when a mother murdered her child in Victorian England she was treated sympathetically by the press and in the courtroom. It is argued that because the crime was considered antithetical to womanhood it was viewed as an indication of insanity. This article examines newspaper reports, trial transcripts, medical literature and popular works on fatherhood, in order to explore the cases of sixty men committed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum between 1864 and 1900 for the murder of their children. It questions two assumptions of the literature on infanticide: first, the idea that it was only women who were thought to be going against nature if they killed their child; and second, that it was only women who regularly successfully pleaded insanity in such cases. The Broadmoor case studies not only demonstrate Victorian attitudes towards paternal child-murder but also provide valuable material illustrating affectionate models of Victorian fatherhood. In trial and press reports detailing the crimes it is clear that fathers were expected, and expected themselves, to be temperate, provide for, and protect their children.

Did the Great Irish Famine increase schizophrenia?

Evidence from regions where there have been severe dietary restriction suggests that individuals in utero during periods of starvation may subsequently be at increased risk of schizophrenia. Because Ireland was the location of a major nineteenth century famine an attempt has been made to determine whether any such evidence for famine/schizophrenia association can be found. The data used derive mainly from the Annual Reports on the District, Criminal and Private Lunatic Asylums supplied by the Inspectors of Lunacy in Ireland for the relevant years. Nineteenth century diagnostic labels have been adjusted to conform to schizophrenia as currently understood. Evidence relating to a possible schizophrenia increase in famine-related emigrants is examined. There was an increase in first admission rates for schizophrenia of 85.7% from 1860 to 1875. Admissions for other disorders, chiefly melancholia, also increased. Similar admission increases were evident in other jurisdictions over the same period. Data relating to the mental health of famine - migrating Irish are sparse and of difficult interpretation. The evidence from available data sources attempting to link the Irish famines of the 1840s with a subsequent increase in the incidence of schizophrenia is equivocal and inconclusive.

Psychiatric services in Jaipur: Past and present

Byline: Shiv. Gautam Era of Asylums (1856-1944) To view the changing perspective of Psychiatry in Rajasthan, we must begin with the story of establishment of lunatic asylums in Rajputana states. It was after the treaty of alliance signed between the native states of Rajputana and the East India Company (1803-1818) that each native state created/established an asylum for detention and care of the lunatics. Initially the lunatics were seen in dispensaries and detained in jails tied with chains. An asylum outside the jail was first established in 1881 in Jaipur state. Ajmer had an asylum inside jail in 1865 (Hendley 1900). Forty unfortunate lunatics were incarcerated inside 'cells' in this asylum, which was situated near Ghatgate (Jaipur). In year 1894, another enclosure in a walled garden near Central Telegraph Office, Jaipur in the southern part of the city was used as asylum by Jaipur state. Here the lunatics were left to enjoy the Open Court Yard and a 'Baradaree', no cots were provided but the atmosphere was more humane and sympathetic towards the unfortunate lunatics who were confined in this asylum. Food and protection were provided by the jail department till 1922, when this asylum was shifted to a Dharamshala situated near Chandpole Gate opposite the present Janana Hospital. Here the lunatics were again put in cells. The medical supervision was provided by the part-time doctors from the jail department. Administration, watch and ward of asylum remained under the jail department till year 1943 (Annual Administrative Reports of Jaipur State, 1894-1943). In 1943, Jaipur state enacted Jaipur Lunacy Act for detention and treatment of lunatics; the criminal procedure code 1926. Jaipur State was amended for the detention and care of the criminal lunatics 1943 (C.P.U. 1943). From the year 1944, the Mental Hospital Jaipur (Lunatic Asylum) started running as an independent hospital under Medical Department of Jaipur State. Till 1922, the control of lunatic asylum was placed under the Rajputana Agency, but after 1922 the administration of lunatic asylum was transferred to Jaipur Durbar. The annual returns from these asylums show a high mortality of lunatics admitted there in, on account of diarrhea, dysentery and fever. Under orders from Jaipur Durbar, the lunatics could be released from asylums for the care of relatives and friends if assured for kind sympathetic care and protection from doing harm to others. All lunatics were admitted under court orders. The discipline of psychiatry is rather a new specialty of medical science. Though understanding of human mind has existed from times immemorial in different philosophical and religious schools, in the middle ages, due to lack of knowledge, superstitions like evil spirits dominated the explanation for various mental disorders. It is only in the late 19[sup] th century that psychoanalytic explanations came in and the last four decades have seen tremendous scientific advancements in understanding of human behavior through biopsychosocial research. The treatment of mental disorders has also been revolutionized in the last four decades and as a result to this the specialty is now a very fast growing subject. As a result of research in mental health, now intricate complexities of the human mind have been understood in terms of neuroelectrical and neurochemical changes occurring in the brain. Specific change occurring with different mood states has been identified and an intervention to bring desired changes in human behavior is now possible. Mental illnesses once thought incurable are now treatable. Mental illness is now considered like any other illness and there is no reason that it should be concealed, and like patients with physical disorder the mentally ill after treatment can be rehabilitated and made useful citizens. Psychiatric Center, Jaipur Psychiatric Centre, Jaipur is the premier institute of the state for treatment and care of mentally ill. …

Criminal insanity in 19th-century Ireland, Europe and the United States: Cases, contexts and controversies

The insanity defence has a lengthy, complex history. This article provides a concise, comparative background to the evolution of criminal insanity legislation and institutions for the mentally ill in the nineteenth century, with particular reference to Ireland and the United States. Three key themes are identified and explored: (a) the emergence of the insanity defence in the nineteenth century (e.g. the McNaughtan Rules); (b) conditions in nineteenth-century asylums and institutions for the ‘criminally insane’ (with particular reference to overcrowding, physical illness and asylum deaths); and (c) nineteenth-century considerations of criminal responsibility in women with mental illness (with particular reference to medical and judicial views of the relevance of menstruation, pregnancy and child-birth). These themes are explored through review of historical literature (with particular reference to the work of Dr. Isaac Ray, founding father of forensic psychiatry in the United States) and examination of previously unpublished archival material from the Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum, Dublin.

Syphilis, psychiatry and offending behaviour: clinical cases from nineteenth-century Ireland

Syphilis presented substantial challenges to nineteenth-century medical and psychiatric services. To illustrate the clinical course and diagnostic challenges associated with neurosyphilis in nineteenth-century Ireland. This paper uses original archival material from the Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum, Dublin to present clinical cases and inform a discussion of related issues. Mr A, a 34-year-old banker convicted of "felonious entry", demonstrated many psychiatric and neurological features of neurosyphilis ("general paralysis of the insane"); he soon became "feeble", "paralytic" and "demented", and died within 2 years. The case of Mr B, a 38-year-old game-keeper convicted of "attempting to upset trains", illustrates diagnostic dilemmas associated with neurosyphilis, especially when complicated by evidence of tuberculosis ("scrofulous diathesis"). The clinical and diagnostic challenges presented by syphilis have changed over the past century, but these cases, combined with recent evidence of syphilis outbreaks, highlight ongoing needs for clinical and epidemiological vigilance.

Learning disability and forensic mental healthcare in 19th century Ireland.

The Irish College of Psychiatrists recently reported that "the needs of people with learning disability and offending behaviour pose a huge challenge to service providers. The vulnerability of people with a learning disability who come into contact with the criminal justice system is well described and noted." The College noted that "the population with learning disability who offend does not easily fit into existing services" and reported that "the majority of service providers strongly supported the urgent development of a forensic learning disability service." The challenges presented by individuals with learning disability and offending behaviour are not specific to Ireland or to this period in history. The purpose of the present paper is to explore issues related to learning disability and offending behaviour in 19th- and early 20th-century Ireland. More specifically, this paper presents original, previously unpublished case material from the archival medical records of the Central Mental Hospital, Dublin in order to illustrate specific aspects of the institutional experience of individuals with learning disability who were charged with offending behaviour in nineteenth-century Ireland. The Central Mental Hospital, Dublin was established as the Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum in 1845 under the provisions of the Lunatics Asylums (Ireland) Act (1845). Individuals were to be committed to the Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum if they were declared 'guilty but insane' at time of trial or offence, or if they developed mental illness and became difficult to manage while in detention elsewhere. The Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum opened its doors to admissions in 1850 and by 1853 there were 69 male and 40 female inpatients.

The mind and its doctors

On 22 September 1796, 31-year-old Mary Lamb, who had been showing signs of insanity for some days, fell into a frenzy, hurled forks and other objects around the room in which the family dinner was being prepared, and stabbed her mother to death with a case-knife. Her brother Charles, coming home to the havoc, took the knife from her and conveyed her to a private madhouse in Islington. The following day, the Coroner's jury ‘sat on the body’ and, the press reported, ‘of course brought in their verdict, Lunacy ’. Mary was treated well in the madhouse—Charles confided that the proprietress and her daughter ‘love her and are taken with her amazingly’—and a few months later was able to come out to a peaceful life in her brother's charge, going back into confinement whenever threatened again by ‘violent agitations’. It is with these ‘Lambs of London’ (the title of a Peter Ackroyd 2004 novel) that Lisa Appignanesi opens her history of women and the mind doctors from the beginning of the 19th century to the present day. Mary's case stands out for the uncontentious judgement of her act as self-evidently— of course —committed in a state of lunacy, resulting in her release into care rather than institutional incarceration. She was lucky inasmuch as Charles was able to convince the authorities that he could guarantee her safe-keeping, but also in that the murder preceded the 1800 Criminal Lunatics Act, designed after an attempt on the life of George III to ensure that such lunatics would be kept under lock and key. Her act came too just before the modern mind-doctoring that would challenge crude ideas of ‘lunacy’ and transform attitudes to mental disorders. It is this that is Appignanesi's subject. Appignanesi is the author of some 10 novels, as well as …

Poverty, Crime and Mental Illness: Female Forensic Psychiatric Committal in Ireland, 1910-1948

SummaryThis article focuses on case-records of all women admitted to the Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum, Dublin between 1910 and 1948. The majority of women were Roman Catholic (85.4 per cent) and had a mean age of 36.4 years. The majority were convicted of a crime (85.7 per cent), of whom 75.0 per cent were convicted of killing, most commonly child-killing. The majority of women detained ‘at the Lord Lieutenant's Pleasure’ (indefinitely) were convicted of murder (51.7 per cent), assault (20.7 per cent) or infanticide (13.8 per cent); mean duration of detention was 5.6 years. The most common diagnoses were ‘mania’ or ‘delusional insanity’ (38.1 per cent) and ‘melancholia’ (23.8 per cent); 7.1 per cent were considered ‘sane’. Following their detention, 28.1 per cent of women were transferred to district asylums and the remainder were released under various different circumstances. In common with similar studies from other countries, these data demonstrate that the fate of these women was largely determined by a combination of societal, legal and medical circumstances, as evidenced by the socio-economic profile of women admitted and changes in admission patterns following the introduction of the Mental Treatment Act 1945. The role of other factors (such as religion) in determining their fate merits further study.

Integration and specialism: complementary not contradictory

Psychiatry, behavioural disturbance and risk management have conceptually coexisted for hundreds of years, however, prior to the 1800 Criminal Lunatics Act, drafted exigently following an attempt on the life of the then King by the “insane” Hadfield, the only means of care was custodial, under arcane vagrancy legislation, such as the 1714 Vagrancy Act, or on the basis of the poor laws. Mentally disordered individuals were either incarcerated as criminals or paupers (Select Committee, 1807) falling under the responsibility of local parish councils. At this point, incarceration was just that, with prisons hosting most detained mentally disordered individuals, under the indefinite see of the monarch. The first vision for caring, secure, environments for mentally disordered individuals was in the development of asylums following the 1808 County Asylums Act, which recognised that detaining, “ lunatics and other insane persons…in Gaols, Houses of Correction, Poor Houses and Houses of Industry, is highly dangerous and inconvenient. ”