Consideration Of Insanity By Juries Criticised

Press, Volume C, Issue 29608, 2 September 1961, Page 13

Consideration Of Insanity By Juries Criticised

The fact that juries often had to consider complicated mental evidence in criminal trials was strongly criticised by Dr. F. O. Bennett, a Christchurch physician, during a discussion on “Mental Hl Health and Legal Responsibility” at the Canterbury Mental Health Council’s seminar yesterday. Excluding the insane, Dr. Bennett said he believed most murderers had in their crazed minds, some justification for their actions. There

was black and white in every case and the shades between were infinite, he said. “However, there is no grey in a legal trial—it has either to be black or white. The accused must understand or not understand. He must know or not know. He is like an examination student, who, if he doesn't get 100 per cent, gets nothing. There are no intermediate marks. ■There is no justice in this. I think it can be accepted that any murderer is suffering from some degree of mental ill health, otherwise he would be deterred by a natural abhorrence of such an act The law is not interested in his mental health unless it is absolute. "Isn’t it time in this mental health year that we stopped making the punishment fit the crime and started to’ think in terms of making it

fit the prisoner?” Dr. Bennett asked.

He said the machinery for determining the terms in which blame should be apportioned was extremely clumsy. “It has to be decided by a jury of 12. Almost invariably they know less about the subject than anyone else in court. The psychiatrist who tries to inform them has had a minimum of 10 years’ training.

“The jury has to approve or reject his views in the course of a few days. If the expert witnesses differ, as unfortunately they sometimes do, the jury has no option but to be guided by the personality of the doctor and by the impression he makes on them. “The material content of what he says is of secondary importance. Yet a man’s life may hang in the balance. Insanity was a medical diagnosis, not a legal one, and should be decided by experts in the field and not by a cross section of the community comprising 12 men. In other issues, including committal to institutions, insanity was decided off-stage by doctors, magistrates and judges, he said. “Why. then, in this grave issue of capital charges, should it go before a jury?” be said.