Opinion ID: 793602
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Origins of the Insanity Defense in Deific Decree Cases

Text: 196 As early as 1800, the defense of not guilty by reason of insanity was successful in a deific decree case in England. See generally Hadfield's Case, 27 How. St. Tr. 1281 (K.B.1800). James Hadfield, a former British soldier, fired a horse pistol at King George III in Drury Lane Theatre but missed the King's head by less than a foot-and-a-half. Richard Moran, The Origin of Insanity as a Special Verdict: The Trial for Treason of James Hadfield (1800), 19 Law & Soc'y Rev. 487, 487 (1985). Hadfield believed that God had told him to sacrifice himself to save the world and chose assassinating the King as the surest way of assuring his own death. Id. at 504-06. Renowned barrister Thomas Erskine defended Hadfield and entered an insanity plea, and the jury returned a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. Id. at 408, 508. 197 Forty-three years later, the House of Lords promulgated the M'Naghten rule, which provides the defense of insanity if, at the time of the committing 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, [he] did not know he was doing what was wrong. M'Naghten's Case, 8 Eng. Rep. 718, 722 (1843). Use of the insanity defense in deific decree cases has been especially widespread in jurisdictions like Ohio following some form of the M'Naghten rule. See State v. Staten, 18 Ohio St.2d 13, 247 N.E.2d 293, 295 (1969) (The Ohio Supreme Court has always stated the substance of [the M'Naghten] rule as a part of its own test for determining whether an accused should be relieved of criminal responsibility for an act.); Margaret E. Clark, Comment, The Immutable Command Meets the Unknowable Mind: Deific Decree Claims and the Insanity Defense after People v. Serravo, 70 Denv. U.L.Rev. 161, 169 (1992) (The major cases dealing with the deific decree come from M'Naghten jurisdictions.). 198 The classic example of insanity under the M'Naghten rule was the deific decree to kill. In 1844, one year after M'Naghten's Case was decided, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts provided this illustration of insanity in a murder trial credited as the first American case to cite the M'Naghten test, Grant H. Morris & Ansar Haroun, God Told Me To Kill: Religion or Delusion?, 38 San Diego L.Rev. 973, 1004 (2001): 199 A common instance is where he fully believes that the act he is doing is done by the immediate command of God, and he acts under the delusive but sincere belief that what he is doing is by the command of a superior power, which supersedes all human laws, and the laws of nature. 200 Commonwealth v. Rogers, 48 Mass. (7 Met.) 500, 503 (1844). 201 In 1882, Charles Guiteau was tried for assassinating President James Garfield and relied upon the insanity defense, claiming that God told him to kill the President. The judge instructed the jury with citation to the above example of insanity and with his own illustration: 202 Another man, whom you know to be an affectionate father, insists that the Almighty has appeared to him and commanded him to sacrifice his child. No reasoning has convinced him of his duty to do it, but the command is as real to him as my voice is now to you. No reasoning or remonstrance can shake his conviction or deter him from his purpose. This is an insane delusion, the coinage of a diseased brain, as seems to be generally supposed, which defies reason and ridicule, which palsies the reason, blindfolds the conscience, and throws into disorder all the springs of human action. 203 United States v. Guiteau, 10 F. 161, 172 (D.D.C.1882). In applying the M'Naghten rule, the judge specifically informed the jury that if [Guiteau] was under an insane delusion that the Almighty had commanded him to do the act, and in consequence of that he was incapable of seeing that it was a wrong thing to do,—then he was not in a responsible condition of mind, and was an object of compassion, and not of justice, and ought to be now acquitted. Id. at 186. 204 Thirty years later, Justice Benjamin Cardozo, then writing for the New York Court of Appeals, concluded that, in the words of two commentators, the deific decree to kill presented the strongest case for finding the defendant insane under the M'Naghten rule. Morris & Haroun, supra, at 1007. Justice Cardozo recounted the previous two examples of insanity and provided another: 205 A mother kills her infant child to whom she has been devotedly attached. She knows the nature and quality of the act; she knows that the law condemns it; but she is inspired by an insane delusion that God has appeared to her and ordained the sacrifice. It seems a mockery to say that, within the meaning of the statute, she knows that the act is wrong. 206 People v. Schmidt, 216 N.Y. 324, 110 N.E. 945, 949 (1915). According to Justice Cardozo, holding such a defendant criminally responsible would be abhorrent, and a jury would likely disregard a jury instruction directing otherwise. Id. 207 In more modern times, both before and after Lundgren's trial, numerous courts, including at least two in Ohio, have recognized, either explicitly or implicitly, the deific decree doctrine as an appropriate basis for the insanity defense, especially in M'Naghten jurisdictions. See cases cited supra in section I.A.