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A Note on Broadmoor Patients

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

R. M. Jackson
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Extract

It is not easy for students to see the subject of insanity and the criminal law as a whole. There is virtually no difficulty over what happens in court, for lawyers are concerned with that and it is adequately described in law books, notably in Archbold. But that is only part of the business, the other part being the concern of administrators. There is no mystery about what the officials do or about the reasons for their actions, and the application of intelligence to published material would give the student the right answer. However, a student may not get things right that way, as I remember that I failed to do (though whether by insufficiency of intelligence or of application I cannot say). I learned about these things when as a Home Office official I came to take part in working the system. The purpose of this note is to give students the framework of the subject. The Criminal Justice Act, 1948, has made some changes, and it is convenient to consider first the position before that Act and to begin with a trial on indictment.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Cambridge Law Journal , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 1951 , pp. 57 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge Law Journal and Contributors 1951

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References

1 I have to thank the Home Office for allowing me to publish this.

2 Criminal Lunatics Act, 1800, s. 2.

3 Criminal Lunatics Act, 1800, s. 2.

4 Trial of Lunatics Act, 1883.

5 Criminal Lunatics Act, 1800, s. 2.

6 Ex parte Collins (1889) 34 L.J.N. 132, which is a brief note of a case and insufficient to be of much value.

7 A special verdict of guilty but insane is treated as an acquittal barring an appeal: Felstead [1914] A.C. 354.

8 An asylum appointed under the 1860 Act is a Criminal Lunatic Asylum. The uninformed assume that all criminal lunatics are seut to a criminal lunatic asylum, which is an error repeated by some lawyers.

9 Criminal Lunatics Act, 1884, s. 5.

10 Criminal Lunatics Act, 1884, s. 3.

11 In the past he was either looked after by private arrangements or became a ‘pauper lunatic,’ later called ‘rate-aided,’ and now he joins the rest of us in getting treatment under the National Health Service.

12 If on a capital charge a jury finds a man guilty but insane and he is sent to Broadmoor and there, in the view of the medical men, is regarded as not being insane at all, the practice is to keep him in Broadmoor for a period corresponding to that for which he would have been kept in prison if he had a commuted death sentence: see Part I of the Minutes of Evidence of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment.

13 There is a footnote in Kenny, Outlines of Criminal Law, repeated in successive editions (p. 67 in the 15th ed., 1936) that apart from puerperal mania only about one prisoner in 150 obtains release from Broadmoor, but no date is given for that figure nor is there any indication of its origin. This footnote is probably the authority upon which many statements about Broadmoor are based.

14 Criminal Lunatics Act, 1884, s. 4.

15 Section 24. (1) Where a person is charged before a court of summary jurisdiction with any act or omission as an offence punishable on summary conviction with imprisonment, and the court— (a) is satisfied that the person did the act or made the omission charged; and (b) is satisfied on the evidence of at least two duly qualified medical practitioners that the person is of unsound mind; and (c) is also satisfied that he is a proper person to be detained, the court may, in lieu of dealing with him in any other manner, by order direct him to be received and detained in such institution for persons of unsound mind as may be named in the order….

16 Mental Deficiency Act, 1913, s. 8.