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Lesion of the Will: Medical Resolve and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian Insanity Trials

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Joel Peter Eigen
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Abstract

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Analysis of courtroom testimony heard in London's Central Criminal Court in the 10 years following the McNaughtan acquittal (1843) reveals the effort of medical witnesses to establish a distinctive and essential voice in the Victorian insanity trial. Three trials that illustrate this effort are examined for the manner in which practitioners of mental medicine distinguished their opinion from the layperson's fact and, in the process, engaged pivotal issues for the determination of criminal responsibility. Their testimony and the attorneys' questions that elicited it suggest that whatever reliance the judiciary might have placed on the McNaughtan Rules to confine testimony to the defendant's capacity to “know right from wrong,” medical witnesses devised ways to circumvent and indeed dismiss the relevance of this particular inquiry.

Type
Professional and Popular Conceptions of Criminal Responsibility
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , 1999 , pp. 425 - 459
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by The Law and Society Association.

References

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