INSANITY DEFENSE The Beginning of the End

In 1812, the “father of American psychiatry,” Benjamin Rush, wrote his Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind, claiming crime to be a curable disease. Viewing murder and theft as symptoms of this disease, he sought to have the perpetrators transferred from the control of policemen to that of psychiatrists. Prior to this, the insanity plea was a legal, not a “medical” decision.

1843: The McNaughton case was the first famous legal test for insanity. Englishman Daniel McNaughton shot and killed the secretary of the British Prime Minister, believing that the Prime Minister was conspiring against him. The court acquitted McNaughton “by reason of insanity” and he was placed in a mental institution for the rest of his life.

1924: Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two young Americans from affluent families, were charged with the senseless killing of a younger companion. Prominent psychiatrists, including William Alanson White, the president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), were hired by the families to explain the state of mind of the offenders. Dr. White testified that the young men’s murderous behavior was the “product of impulses contrary to their conscious ideals but expressive of certain strange unconscious strivings that, for reasons not clear, overwhelmed their control.” Never questioning the lack of science to this, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia adopted the defense of “irresistible impulse” — an impulse that could “override the reason and judgment and obliterate the sense of right and wrong.”

Using the case as a springboard, Dr. White and the American Psychiatric Association recommended that a psychiatrist be attached to every criminal and juvenile court and every penal and correctional institution, that no sentence for any felony be made without a psychiatric report, and that a psychiatric evaluation be conducted on every prisoner convicted of a felony before he was released, or before he was placed on parole or transferred to another institution. Consequently psychiatric departments were established in juvenile courts and prisons.

1954: The landmark Durham decision established psychiatry solidly in the court systems and set the precedent for the rest of the world. On July 13, 1951, Monte Durham, a 23-year-old man with a long criminal and psychiatric history, was tried
and convicted of housebreaking, despite his insistence that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. That presiding Judge David Bazelon of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., overruled this decision, turned the standard of right or wrong on its head and opened the door wide for psychiatric testimony in the courts was not a coincidence. He was undergoing psychoanalysis himself.

1957: Abe Fortas, a court-appointed defense attorney (later Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court), assessed the impact of the Durham decision stating: “… [T]he law has recognized modern psychiatry. … Its importance is that it is a charter, a bill of rights, for psychiatry and an offer of limited partnership between criminal law and psychiatry.”

1966: Another judgment by Bazelon established “the right of a mental patient to appropriate treatment” Psychiatrists interpreted this as their right to enforce treatment. Professor Szasz points out that it is not surprising that Bazelon became a “much-decorated hero” of psychiatry, receiving both a Certificate of Commendation and an award from the APA. Bazelon was “one of the most prominent advocates of psychiatric coercion concealed as care and cure. He … succeeded in deforming liberty by ostensibly reforming criminology and psychiatry— an enterprise whose worth he … gravely misjudged, partly by thinking that it is good, when it is evil, and partly by believing that it rests on new discoveries when in fact it rests on old deceptions.”

Today: Psychiatric “experts” are paid an average of $3,600 (in the U.S.) per day to testify for whomever is willing to foot the bill.

Psychiatric “expert” testimony was used by attorney Clarence Darrow in 1924 to successfully argue that confessed killers Leopold and Loeb were not responsible for their acts.

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