Opinion ID: 1699444
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: should gill be condemned?

Text: I have begun to have some problems with the M'Naghten Rule; it is too simplistic. What does not knowing the difference between right and wrong mean? Sane people struggle with this. Is a state sponsored lottery right or wrong? A little over one hundred years ago this Nation endured a bitter four-year Civil War. In my reading of history I cannot recall any leader from either side ever acknowledging morality was not on his side. (There may have been such an individual, but if so, he was in a distinct minority.) So much for M'Naghten as a general proposition. But, it is said, the rule applies to a situation where any sane person would know whether it is morally right or wrong to commit the act, such as stealing, robbing, or in the case of a paranoid schizophrenic, assaulting or killing. Why doesn't the rule apply to Gill's psychosis? Abstractly a paranoid schizophrenic (if his mind is not too deranged to be able to think at all) knows it is wrong to steal, he knows to go to church on Sunday. He may know to eat his wheaties. Befuddled as his mind is, he may very well know it is wrong to injure or kill another person in the abstract. The trouble is that in his freak mind he has done a proper thing in injuring or killing, as a normal person might consider it proper to shoot a burglar entering his house at night, or shoot a violent attacker upon himself or family. In a paranoid schizophrenic's mind the person he stabs, chops, clubs or shoots may have been about to drop a nuclear bomb, throw acid on him, or wreak some other terrible catastrophe. Indeed, in the paranoid schizophrenic's mind he frequently is acting upon direct instruction from the Lord. Even the second prong of the M'Naghten Rule, whether he realizes the nature and consequences of his act, hardly suffices. While he may very well know he is hurting another, his delusion compels a mind-set he acts from an absolute necessity.