Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 17, 1922. MENTAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR CRIME

Evening Post, Volume CIII, Issue 141, 17 June 1922, Page 4

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 17, 1922. MENTAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR CRIME

The agitation of which the case of Reginald True has been the subject is very unusual, if not unique. A convicted murderer, unless the evidence of his guilt is overwhelming, can always rely on a certain amount of sympathy, and, whether the- issue is the sufficiency of the evidence against him or a suggested doubt as to his mental capacity, the demand of popular sentiment is usually for leniency. In True's case the popular demand has been of the opposite kind. Instead of the crowd calling for mercy and denouncing the barbarity of a Government which is obdurate or dubious, the public indignation in the present case is directed at the Home Secretary, who has saved the murderer from the gallows. The case is not one' in which there could be any question of a pardon. The crime was of a peculiarly brutal and revolting character, and the evidence of True's guilt irresistible. The sanity of the man was the only question which admitted of any doubt. It was fully argued at the trial, but the decision was against the prisoner. It was open to the jury to find him " guilty but insane," but they refused to do so. / After instituting a medical inquiry on his own account, the Home Secretary has come to a different conclusion. True has accordingly been granted a respite, and sent to Broadmoor Asylum as insane.

One of the speciaj grounds for the outcry against the Home Secretary's decision is that Lady White's murderer, who was convicted about the same time, received no respite in spite of the jury's recommendation to mercy. On the essential points there was probably no resemblance at all between the two cases, but it was enoiigh for the crowd that they came close together and it was the poor man who had been sent to the gallows.

Letters, we were informed by cable on Monday, are pouring into the newspaper offices protesting' that Jacoby was • a poor, friendless lad, while True, the son of a rich, titled, and influential mother, whose name has not been disclosed, becomes the guest of the nation at Broadmoor, where he will be allowed to play cricket and billiards. The letters also point out that no money- was spared on True's defence, and that the question of sanity according to the legal definition was fully argued at the trial.

Whether it is clamouring for mercy or for blood, popular sentiment pays little heed to the laws of logic, and it is evident that prejudice had as much as anything else to do with the resentment of the Home Secretary's action. The Dai'y Express even went so far as to say that " Mr. Shortt's error of judgment in reprieving True renders him unfit to be Home Secretary." As Mr. Shortt acted upon the unanimous advice of the medical men to whom the question was referred, the Daily Express should demand their scalps also, unless it is prepared to say either that he should not have taken expert advice on the matter or that, having taken it, he should have refused to abide by it.

Defending the Home Secretary, and probably speaking, as it often does, with inside information, the Daily Chronicle suggests that True's insanity had developed since the trial. It declares that Mr. Shortt had no alternative but to refer the question to medical experts, and " they inquired, not whether True was legally insane when he committed the crime, but whether he was now medically insane." According to this statement, the Home Secretary's experts were not merely reviewing the correctness of the jury's verdict, as Jbhe Court of Criminal Appeal might have reviewed it. Their task was different from that of the jury in two vital respects.

The jury had to consider True's state of mind when he committed the crime; the expirts were considering the state of mind in which they found him months later. Secondly, the issue before the jury was whether the man was " legally insane "; the question for the experts was whether he was " medically insane." Mr. Shorfct certainly cannot be blamed for accepting the unanimous opinion of his experts as conclusive on the points submitted to them, but the responsibility, for the selection of the points was his alone, and the question is whether they were properly selected. We have, of course, assumed that the Daily Chronicle's statement of the case is correct, but the assumption is confirmed to some extent by Mr. Shortt's reply to his critics in the House of Commons. " The principle that an insane man shall not go to execution had," he said, " been enshrined in the law for three centuries." This answer means that the state of the prisoner's mind at the date of the crime, was not the object of the Home Secretary's inquiry, The ; experts had only to certify as to its present condition. The question whether an insane man should suffer for a crime which he committed when sane is interesting and difficult. The theoretically best course would, perhaps, be to restore him to sanity and then hang him. It certainly is an odd kind of humanity to keep a man alive when he has admittedly no right to life, except while he remains insane. A more important feature of the case, however, is its contribution to^ the controversy as; to the tests of mental bility for crime. The doctors are endeavouring to alter the legal tests which, though laid down by the House of Lords as long ago as 1843, were included in our Criminal Code exactly fifty years later, and are still a part both of our law and of the law of England. Mental weakness is no answer to a crim-. inal charge unless such as to render the accused " incapable of understanding the nature and quality of the act or omission, and of knowing that such act or omission was wrong." No better practical teat has yet been laid down, but the doctors contend that there is no such thing as " partial insanity," and that the will must be measured as well as the intellect.

In the Courts the medical theory has as yet made little or no headway during the last eighty years, but if, after failing in Court, the doctors can succeed before the Home Secretary, the ultimate victory will be with them, and the administration of justice will suffer much more seriously than if they won at the outset. It was clearly to this aspect of True's case that Mr.. Justice Avery was referring when he told the Grand Jury at Exeter that " he much doubted if the abatement of crime would continue if the infliction of the penalties of the law was to be left to the discretion of Harley-street experts." The secrecy of this Medical- Court of Criminal Appeal which advises the Government is another very serious matter. The murderer is tried in open Court, but the tribunal which decides whether the sentence shall stand sits in secret, and the Home Secretary or Minister of External Affairs tells us just as much about the reasons as inquisitive M.P.'s or pressmen can worry out of him. The moial of True's case, like that of our own Timaru murder case, is that more daylight must be let into the final stage of what is practically a criminal appeal.