Insanity and Crime.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18014, 5 March 1924, Page 8

Insanity and Crime.

The Executive Council's reprieve of the murderer Higgins raises again the difficult question of the relation between insanity and crime. It is a fact of some importance to the community that while the verdict of the jury was a sound one according to law, the overriding verdict of the Executive Council is an even better founded one according to medical science. No one ever had any doubt that the man who ran amok in the Waikino school-room was what everybody would call a madman. Yet it is quite possible that if Dr. Levinge had not written his telling

letter to "The Press," and if the condemned man's counsel had not secured a petition to the Executive Council, the sentence of death would by this time have been carriod out: tho jury made no appeal for mercy—perhaps because the members of it were still influenced by the emotional disturbance the crime had caused them, and perhaps because they thought the man would be better dead —and their verdict wag a perfectly just one legally. For the law asks only whether the accused knew, at the time of committing the offence, that he was doing wrong, and it was not established that Higgins did not know this. The Court had no power to ask if, while he knew that he was doing wrong, he was able to abstain from doing it, this being a medical question which the legal definition of insanity does not cover. And it is obviously a more fundamental question than the first. For if a man cannot, by reason of disease of body, mind, or will, abstain from doing a certain action, his view of the nature of the action is of comparatively little importance. If Higgins had so strong an impulse to murder the children of his neighbours (imagined to bo his persecutors) that he could not by any action of his own control it, then, in every sense but a legal one, he was still irresponsible though, he knew that ~t was wrong to murder children. But in a legal sense responsibility is not at all a question of the power to do, but only of the power to know. The man who does wrong not because his reasoning faculty is deranged, but because his emotional and instinctive activities cannot be controlled, gets no mercy under New Zealand or English law. Our law still says that a man is insane only if, at the time of committing the act, he was labouring under such a defect of mind as not to know tho nature and quality of the act, or knowing that, still did not know that ho was doing what was wrong. It is to be noted, too, that a committee of eminent British lawyers appointed by the Lord Chancellor to consider what changes, if any, should bo made in tho law, practice, and procedure rolating to crime and insanity, found that the present test for determining criminal responsibility (formulated in the !McNaghten case eighty years ago) is sound, and should be retained. But while they could not suggest any alteration in the McNaghten rules they proposed this very important addition:

It should be recognised that a person charged criminally with an offence is irresponsible for his act when the act is committed under an impulse which the prisoner was _by mental disease in substance deprived of any power to resist.

Tried by that test Higgins would have had to be found not guilty on the grounds of insanity or irresponsibility, and until the law can be amended so as to allow such a question to be submitted to the jury, the criminally insane of the impulsive type will have no hope other than the clemency of the Crown. And the point is that if society thinlcs that a sufficient hope for them: —or thinks indeed that where their impulses are murderous it is not in the public interest to keep them alive—it should say so. What it says at present is that a man who is not responsible for his actions should not suffer' for them (other than by a humane restraint), and it applies an eighty-year-old and quite unscientific test to determine responsibility.