Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Wharton and Stille's medical jurisprudence. Source: Wellcome Collection.
![turmoil, excitement, or debility, the specific and deliberate and cool intent to take life, essential, in most American States, to murder in the first degree, is not capable of proof, and in which, therefore, the verdict is properly murder in the second degree, or manslaughter.^1) § 123. But there are phases of insanity to which even this * attribute of “diminished” responsibility cannot with any justice be applied. That the so-called “moral’7 insanity (i.e. a supposed condition in which the moral system is insane but the mental sane), is not one of these phases, will be hereafter abundantly shown.(g) § 124. But it is otherwise with insanity accompanied with delusions of such a character that the patient believes he is authorized by superior authority to dispense with the law of the land, and with insanity one of whose elements is an impulse to commit crime which the reason is unable to resist. If there be such phases of insanity as these, it is clear that their subjects are not responsible to the ordinary processes of penal justice. Yet such patients the “right and wrong” test might pronounce sane. In such cases, therefore, this test cannot be exclusively applied. (bl) When the defendant is acting under an insane delusion AS TO CIRCUMSTANCES, WHICH, IF TRUE, WOULD RELIEVE THE ACT FROM RESPONSIBILITY, OR WHERE HIS REASONING POWERS ARE SO DEPRAVED AS TO MAKE THE COMMISSION OF THE PARTICULAR ACT THE NATURAL CONSEQUENCE OF THE DELUSION. [For several valuable medico-juridical opinions in cases of alleged delusions, see infra, Appendix, §§ 833, 834, 837, 843.] § 125. The answer of the English judges on this point requires special comment. The question propounded to them in this respect was, “ If a person, under an insane delusion as to existing facts, commits an offence in consequence thereof, is he thereby excused?” “To which question,” they replied, “the answer must of course depend on the nature of the delusion ; but, making the same assumption as we did before, (p1) See infra, $§ 181, 200. (q) See infra, §§ 163, 189, 533, 567.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20420237_0001_0140.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
