Such a procedure is in general use in Germany
and other continental countries, and is likewise substantially
followed in Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire.*
* Another equally efficacious means of dealing with the matter
would be to substitute, upon a defendant's plea of insanity, a
full jury of experts--like any "special" jury--for the
ordinary petit jury.
There is good reason to hope that we may soon see in all the
states adequate provision for preliminary examination upon the
plea of insanity, and a new test of criminal responsibility
consistent with humanity and modern medical knowledge. Even
then, although murderers who indulge in popular crime will
probably be acquitted on the ground of insanity, we shall at
least be spared the melancholy spectacle of juries arbitrarily
committing feeble-minded persons charged with homicide to
imprisonment at hard labor for life, and in a large measure do
away with the present unedifying exhibition of two groups of
hostile experts, each interpreting an archaic and inadequate
test of criminal responsibility in his own particular way, and
each conscientiously able to reach a diametrically opposite
conclusion upon precisely the same facts.
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