Insanity defense and

This ostensibly lofty aspiration of saving the defendant from execution was the motive behind the important M Naghten decision, in 1843. Known as the M Naghten rule, this decision has ever since provided the medicolegal basis for the insanity plea, the insanity defense, and the insanity verdict. In modern psychiatric texts the insanity defense is thus invariably attributed to the discoveries of scientific psychiatry and its recent burgeoning popularity, in this and other Western countries, to the long-overdue legislative and judicial appreciation of the supposed contributions of... 

Szasz, T. S. The insanity defense and the insanity verdict. Temple Law Quart., 40 271-282 (Spring-Summer), 1967. 

Jeffery, C. R. (1985), Attacks on the Insanity Defense Biological Psychiatry and New Perspectives on Criminal Behavior, Charles Thomas, Springfield, IL. 

But against Poland — the one country which even in Wagnerian saga and the insanely defensive imagination of Adolf Hitler had never been named as a real enemy. That Poland could be a threat to Germany was so fantastic the defendants didn t even pretend they believed it. Had they realized the danger of war too late to turn back ... 

The authors of DSM-IV further assert that a common misconception is that a classification of mental disorders classifies people, when actually what are being classified are disorders that people have. Then, perhaps in an attempt to forestall the criticism that the psychiatrist s paradigmatic interventions are forensic—civil commitment and the insanity defense—the authors add this disingenuous disclaimer DSM-IV is a classification of mental disorders that was developed for use in clinical, educational, and research settings.. . . When the categories, criteria, and textual descriptions are... 

To make the innocent by reason of insanity defense work, a defense lawyer must produce an expert witness who will testify that the defendant was truly insane, even if temporarily. During the 1930s and 40s when scientific research on marijuana was virtually nonexistent, there was only one witness in the country who could be called on to testify about the effects of marijuana. It was Munch, Anslinger s own marijuana expert who claimed to have injected the drug into dogs. 

Meanwhile, Anslinger was beginning to develop doubts that marijuana was the culprit in the murder cases, and he was bothered by the successful marijuana insanity defenses. He wrote to Munch and told him that if he did not stop testifying for the defense, he would be fired as the official marijuana expert of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The pharmacologist stopped testifying, and since there were no other marijuana experts around at the time, the insanity by marijuana defenses ended. By then, though, marijuana had become known as a drug that turned people into insane killers. 

Incredibly, as eminent a legal authority as Abe Fortas uses the expression, a bill of rights for psychiatry. In my opinion. he writes, the importance of the [Durham] decision cannot he judged hy a semantic exercise. Its importance is not due to the new standard that it established for adjudicating the defense of insanity. Durham is not a charter of liberty for the insane. Rather, as I shall show, its importance is that it is a charter, a bill of rights, for psychiatry and an offer of a limited partnership relationship between criminal law and psychiatry. (Abe Fortas, Implications of Durham s case, Amer. J. Psychiat., 113 577-588 [Jan.], 957 P- 579-)... 

In another murder trial during the same period, the defendant did not even claim to use the drug. He declared that there had been a bag of marijuana in the room and it had put out homicidal vibrations that made him kill dogs, cats, and ultimately two police officers. In the years immediately following the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act, where the marijuana defense was used, the defendants in those and other murder trials were all found innocent by reason of insanity. 

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