Trials of Passion (14 page)

In this vein it could be said of Christiana Edmunds that she found herself impelled to lift a hand with a poisoned chocolate in it to the mouth of the woman who stood in the way of her obtaining ‘justice' in the form of Charles Beard's ‘promised' love; when it didn't come, she was driven to the ‘desperate alternative' of broadcasting her poison, but with no ‘intentional malice' of killing Sidney Barker.

The M'Naghten case of 1843 introduced a new degree of subtlety into the understanding of legal insanity and became the model for all cases of criminal responsibility in Anglo-American and commonwealth law, including India.

Daniel M'Naghten (1813–65) was the illegitimate son of a Scottish woodturner. According to the great advocate who defended him, Alexander Cockburn, later to be the leading jurist in the Isabella Robinson case, M'Naghten was a man of sober habits and ‘of singularly sensitive mind [who] spent his days in incessant labour and toil, and at night gave himself up to the study of difficult and abstruse matters'. After a period as a journeyman when his father would not accept him as a partner, he went on to run his own business in Glasgow, using his free time to attend the Glasgow Mechanics' Institute and a debating society. Late in 1840, already prey to a sense ‘that persons persecuted him' and suffering from torturing headaches, he sold this lucrative enterprise. Why? – because ‘the fearful phantasms of his own imagination rendered his existence miserable' and ‘these terrifying
delusions had become associated with the place of his abode haunting him at all hours of day and night'.

M'Naghten travelled to England and France, but he couldn't escape his persecutors, and late in 1841 he returned to Glasgow. He acted, according to Cockburn, as a sane man would act: he went to the authorities of his native place, to those who could afford him protection, and ‘with clamours, entreats and implores them to defend him from the conspiracy' that was affecting his happiness and his whole life. But when M'Naghten told his father and the Glasgow police commissioner that he was being persecuted by the Tories and followed by their spies, they only tried to dissuade, and provided no help. So on the afternoon of 20 January 1843, M'Naghten approached Prime Minister Robert Peel's private secretary, Edward Drummond, who had just emerged from the Prime Minister's house, and shot him from behind at point-blank range. It is probable that he thought he was aiming at the Prime Minister. He was quickly apprehended and didn't resist arrest. Sadly, Drummond died five days later, having been bled by incompetent doctors.

At London's Bow Street magistrates' court the following morning, M'Naghten's statement repeated what he had earlier told his father:

The Tories in my native city have compelled me to do this. They follow me and persecute me wherever I go and have entirely destroyed my peace of mind. They followed me to France, into Scotland and all over England; in fact, they follow me wherever I go. I can get no rest from them night or day. I cannot sleep at night in consequence of the course they pursue towards me. I believe they have driven me into a consumption. I am sure I shall never be the man I formerly was. I used to have good health and strength, but I have not now. They have accused me of crimes of which I am not guilty; they do everything in their power to harass and persecute me; in fact they wish to murder me. It can be proved by evidence; that's all I have to say.

The trial began on 3 March 1843, since the defence had been granted time to call in evidence from Scotland and perhaps France. The prosecution tried to place the attempt on the Prime Minister's life in the context of the ongoing furore around the protectionist Corn Laws which kept food prices high. The Solicitor General, Sir William Webb Follett, argued in a restrained opening that despite what might be M'Naghten's ‘partial insanity', his morbid delusion of mind upon some subjects, it was not enough to deflect responsibility ‘if he had that degree of intellect which enabled him to know and distinguish between right and wrong; if he knew what would be the effects of his crime and consciously committed it, and if with that consciousness he wilfully committed it'.

Cockburn's opening statement set a standard of debate and knowledge about mental illness and the insanity defence that had never before been seen in an English court. Amongst much else, it showed the growing sophistication of the medical literature on madness that had come into the public arena over the last decade. Cockburn, a Scotsman and an intellectual, drew on the authorities: ‘Science is ever on the advance; and, no doubt, science of this kind, like every other, is in the advance of the generality of mankind ... We who have the ordinary duties of our several stations and the business of our respective avocations to occupy our full attention, cannot be so well informed upon it as those who have scientifically pursued the study and treatment of the disease [of madness].'

Cockburn then turned to the ‘doctrines of matured science' and quoted from Dr James Pritchard's
On the Different Forms of Insanity in Relation to Jurisprudence
, published the preceding year. He drew on the American expert in the field Dr Isaac Ray, and his
Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity
(1838). Both criticized the verdicts in the Arnold and Bellingham trials, while Ray also took issue with Justice Hale, who had been blind to the power of ‘those nice shades of the disease in which the mind, without being wholly driven from its propriety, pertinaciously clings to some absurd delusion ... Could Lord Hale have contemplated the scenes presented by the lunatic asylums of our own
times, we should undoubtedly have received from him a very different doctrine for the regulations of the decisions of after generations' Cockburn even cited the French authority Charles Chrétien Henri Marc, physician for twenty-three years to Louis-Philippe, who in 1840 had published
De la Folie dans ses rapports avec les questions médico-legales.

Marc's main emphasis was that insanity was no simply understood disorder of thought, or ‘cognition' as we would say today; but a condition in which the will was perverted and the self couldn't be mastered, functioning as it did not so much without reason, but against the reasoning self. These distortions of passion and volition, after Esquirol, would ever be a primary part of the language of the French mind doctors, though the English legal system was loath to allow into the courts any defence on the grounds of ‘irresistible impulse' or toppling of volition.

Cockburn even called on David Hume's
Commentaries on the Law of Scotland
to dispute that, to be acknowledged by a court, madness must needs expect of the accused that he ‘must have lost all knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong'. For Hume, this was a delicate question. The accused might say it was wrong to kill a neighbour and ‘yet is so absolutely mad as to have lost all true observation of facts, all understanding of the good or bad intention of those who are around him, or even the knowledge of their persons'. Every judgement in the matter of right and wrong, Hume wrote, and Cockburn argued, ‘supposes a case, or state of facts, to which it applies'. And though the accused may have the vestige of reason which enables him to answer in the general that murder is a crime, yet ‘if he cannot distinguish his friend from his enemy, or a benefit from an injury, but conceive everything about him to be the reverse of what it really is, and mistake the illusions of his fancy realities in respect of his own condition and that of others, those remains of intellect are of no use to him towards the government of his actions, nor in enabling him to form a judgment on any particular situation or conjunction of what is right or wrong with regard to it'.

If the great Hume didn't suffice to make the case, Cockburn then proceeded to call on medical experts to prove that M'Naghten's delusions
had left him in a state where he was no longer a ‘reasonable and responsible being'. Dr Forbes Winslow was one of the medics to argue that these delusions had robbed M'Naghten of all restraint over his actions. Everyone was swayed by Cockburn's eloquence. Without leaving the box, the jury gave a hurried verdict of ‘not guilty on the ground of insanity'. M'Naghten was discharged and moved to Bethlem Hospital under an order from the Home Secretary. He remained there until 1864, a quiet, methodical inmate but increasingly ‘imbecilic', and was then transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum where he died a year later.

But M'Naghten's name, in any variety of spellings, echoes through the courts into our own day.

The public outcry over his not-guilty verdict was similar to the explosions of moral outrage seen in our own time when an accused deemed to be ‘schizophrenic' or diagnosed with a ‘dangerous personality disorder' seems literally to be getting away with murder. In 1843, the unease amongst jurists and the profession about the status of insanity in criminal trials, and the question of how to decide on responsibility, prompted an immediate response from the House of Lords. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Lyndhurst, convened a debate thus:

The circumstances connected with that trial have created a deep sensation amongst your Lordships, and also in the public mind. I am not surprised at this. A gentleman in the prime of life, of a most amiable character, incapable of giving offence or of injuring any individual, was murdered in the streets of this metropolis in open day. The assassin was secured; he was committed for trial; that trial has taken place, and he has escaped with impunity. Your Lordships will not be surprised that these circumstances should have created a deep feeling in the public mind, and that many persons should, upon the first impression, be disposed to think that there is some great defect in the laws of the country with reference to this subject w hich calls for a revision of those laws, in order that a repetition of such outrages may be prevented.

Twelve judges of the Court of Common Pleas were duly convened and asked to consider five questions put to them by the Lords, many of them themselves lawyers. All the questions dealt in some way with the effect on law of alleging that a prisoner was suffering from delusion or partial madness. The Lords were not interested in the complexities of mental illness. Their concern was the proper working of the law and a firm definition of what constituted criminal responsibility in this area. On 19 June, the judges attended the Lords in order to provide their answers. Their one major clarification on previous law was to take on Hume's point and relate insanity not to any abstract or general knowledge of right and wrong, but to a knowledge of right and wrong with respect to their particular crime. The basic addition to the law that the much cited M'Naghten rules specify reads:

The jury ought to be told in all cases that every man is to be presumed to be sane, and to possess a sufficient degree of reason to be responsible for his crimes, until the contrary can be proved to their satisfaction; and that, to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved, that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring 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, or, if he did know it, that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong.

The judges also introduced a clarification that would lead to further decades of confusion and argument in Anglo-American and Commonwealth courtrooms. The Lords had asked them to consider the question: if a person under an insane delusion as to existing facts commits an offence in consequence thereof, is he thereby excused?

‘Not altogether,' came the answer – itself a perfect model of misunderstanding, since it seemed to demand of the deluded person the same degree of ‘reason, judgment and controlling mental power' as it did of one in sound mental health, an American judge later noted. The M'Naghten judges would have it that if the person labours under
a partial delusion ‘and is not in other respects insane', he should be considered in the same way as a sane person. Tor example, if under the influence of his delusion, he supposes another man to be in the act of attempting to take away his life, and he kills that man, as he supposes, in self-defence, he would be exempt from punishment. If his delusion was that the deceased had inflicted a serious injury to his character and fortune, and he killed him in revenge for such supposed injury, he would be liable to punishment.'

In the practice of everyday justice, all this led to muddle: insanity rulings had little consistency. Twenty-nine years after M'Naghten, when Christiana Edmunds came to trial, nothing much had changed, except that the numbers of mental specialists had grown. So had the population of asylum inhabitants.

10.
‘Enceinte! She Says She Is, My Lord'

In the summary remarks of Sergeants at Law Ballantine and Parry and in Judge Baron Martin's final address to the jury in R. v Edmunds, the legal definition of insanity and its tangled history in English courts played a major part.

Parry began by arguing that the crime for which Christiana was being charged had no motive. She had no direct reason to murder the boy, Sidney Barker. Parry then moved on to the terrain of insanity, his main defence. He drew on the case of Hadfield, pointing out that even within his delusion he knew he had attempted murder, yet no one had questioned his insanity nor the propriety of a verdict that had named him mad. In Christiana's case the family record of insanity was greater than he, in his wide experience, had ever witnessed. All the experts as well as the Reverend at Lewes jail agreed that she was insane. Would this case end up being a contest between the law and medical science? The men who had made ‘mental disease their particular study were benefactors of the human race' and were entitled to respect. They deemed Christiana to be of ‘unsound mind' and incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong, which was the ultimate test of insanity.

Ballantine responded with a rather different review of the case. His step-by-step description of Christiana's doings showed her to be ‘a woman exhibiting powers of great contrivance and considerable cunning'. It was clear that Dr Beard's imputation of a crime against his wife had set her on the path of folly. The primary motive of the prisoner, he submitted, was to absolve herself from blame in a family with which she had been intimate and ‘to fix on anybody else the culpability that would otherwise attach to herself'. This is what had resulted in the death of Sidney Barker.