Court Opinion

ID: 8638573
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-24 19:49:19.964058+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:56:01.200071
License: Public Domain

STORY, Circuit Justice.
We are of opinion, that the indictment upon these admitted facts cannot be maintained. The prisoner was unquestionably insane at the time of committing the offence. And the question made at the bar is, whether insanity, whose remote cause is habitual drunkenness, is, or is not, an excuse in a court of law for a homicide committed by the party, while so insane, but not at the time intoxicated or under the influence of liquor. We are clearly of opinion, that insanity is a competent excuse in such a case. In general, insanity is an excuse for the commission of every crime, because the party has not the possession of that reason, which includes responsibility. An exception is, when the crime is committed by a party while in a fit of intoxication, the law not permitting a man to avail himself of the excuse of his own gross vice and misconduct, to shelter himself from the legal consequences of such crime. But the crime must take place and be the immediate result of the fit of intoxication, and while it lasts; and not, as in this case, a remote consequence, superinduced by the antecedent exhaustion of the party, arising from gross and habitual drunkenness. However criminal in a moral point of view such an indulgence is, and however justly a party may be responsible for his acts arising from it to Almighty God, human tribunals are generally restricted from punishing them, since they are not the acts of a reasonable being. Had the crime been committed while Drew was in a fit of intoxication, he would have been liable to be convicted of murder. As he was not then intoxicated, but merely insane from an absti*914nence from liquor, he cannot be pronounced guilty of the offence. The law looks to the immediate, and not to the remote cause; to the actual state of the party, and not to the causes, which remotely produced it. Many species of insanity arise remotely from what In a moral view is a criminal neglect or fault of the party, as from religious melancholy, undue exposure, extravagant pride, ambition, &c. Yet such insanity has always been deemed a sufficient excuse for any crime done under its influence.
Verdict, “Not guilty.”