A statute systematically violated is worse
than no statute at all, and exactly in so far as we secure a
sort of justice by evading the law as it stands, we make a
laughing-stock of our procedure.
The law is, simply, that any person is to be held criminally
responsible for a deed unless he was at the time laboring
under such a defect of reason as not to know the nature and
quality of his act and that it was wrong.
This doctrine first took concrete form in 1843, when, after a
person named McNaughten, who had shot and killed a certain Mr.
Drummond under an insane delusion that the latter was Sir
Robert Peel, had been acquitted, there was such popular
uneasiness over the question of what constituted criminal
responsibility that the House of Lords submitted four
questions to the fifteen judges of England asking for an
opinion on the law governing responsibility for offences
committed by persons afflicted with certain forms of insanity.
It is unnecessary to set forth at length these questions, but
it is enough to say that the judges formulated the foregoing
rule as containing the issue which should be submitted to the
jury in such cases.
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