I’ve read about the hung jury on the Lindsay Clancy trial. In case you have somehow missed it, the question was never whether or not she strangled her 3 children, but whether or not she was insane when she did it.
I’m no lawyer – but I do know that a lot of our law comes from Britain – and I recall reading about a man named M’Naghton. Way back in 1843, over a dozen years before Freud’s birth, Daniel M’Naghton came up behind the Prime Minister’s secretary, Edward Downing, a shot him in the back. Unlike Luigi Mangione, M’Naghton shot his victim in front of a constable who then grabbed him from behind, disarmed him, and took him to the slammer.
Now the case gets significant because Queen Victoria had gone through three assassination attempts in the two previous years – and wasn’t impressed with M’Naghton being found innocent by reason of insanity. To be fair, the old British rule, that held an insane person exempt from legal responsibility and punishment, seems a bit stressed. M’Naghton’s courtroom statement: “I was driven to desperation by persecution,” and his addition “I am guilty of firing” along with his initial statement “The Tories in my native city have compelled me to do this. They follow, persecute me wherever I go, and have entirely destroyed my peace of mind… It can be proved by evidence. That is all I have to say.” suggest that he may have been a bubble or two off plumb. On the other hand, witnesses who knew him testified that, in general, he appeared sane.
The case ended with M’Naghton not guilty – due to his diminished capacity – and spending the rest of his life in the state criminal lunatic asylum at Bethlem, until transferred to the Broadmoor Asylum, where he died in 1865.
Queen Victoria was bothered by the verdict – and, again, in all fairness, after getting through three assassination attempts (how many has Trump been through?) decided to use her (considerable) political influence, and she asked the House of Lords to put some questions to judges – kind of like directing the Senate to quiz the Supreme Court, then clarify the issue with a new law (M’Naghton, in the criminal lunatic asylum, was in no danger).
Long story shortened – one of the judge’s replies became the M’Naghton rule: The M’Naghten Rule provides as follows: “Every man is to be presumed to be sane, and … that to establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of mind, and not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.”
It gets a bit more complicated – M’Naghton was a wood turner – in other words he ran a lathe for a living – with a fresh deposit of 750 pounds in his bank account. In today’s terms, sixty thousand unexplained dollars had showed up in his bank account just before he murdered Downing. M’Naghton never said it, but the belief at the time was that he had mistaken Downing for Prime Minister Robert Peale.
The M’Naghton rule seems reasonable to me. I can understand the difficulty that a jury of 12 people might have deciding how nuts Lindsay Clancy was the day she killed he three children. Like the hold-out juror, I’m a bit reluctant to defer to the expertise of psychologists. I’ve seen several who chose not to follow their own professional rules. Reasonable doubt also includes reasonable doubt about expert testimony.
So long as Lindsay Clancy isn’t in a spot where she can commit more murders, it really doesn’t make a difference – and should she recover mental health, the knowledge of what she has done should be a greater punishment than the court could inflict. There has never been any doubt about Lindsay Clancy killing her three kids. There has never been any doubt that the woman is bug nuts. The jury’s task was to decide if she understood that killing her kids was wrong, an immoral decision. I can understand why the jury was deadlocked. I know she was – and probably still is – insane. I know she was the killer. The challenge to the jury was to determine how nuts she was. Or is.
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