1. Since the dawn of recorded law, Western societies have recognised that some people shouldn’t be held liable for their acts because they are non compos mentis – not in their right mind. This exemption from criminal sanctions was seen as an act of mercy required by basic morality: it was immoral to exact vengeance against a person who didn’t know that his behaviour was wrong. This principle was well-established in English common law, and from there into the law of the United States. The question has always been ‘the kind and degree of insanity that would excuse its victim from punishment for an act which if done by a sane person would bring upon him the sanctions of the law’, as put in the House of Lords in 1843.

exemption:[ig'zempʃən] n.免除                                 vengeance:['vendʒəns] n.报复；报仇

2. Former forensic psychologists and prosecuting attorneys in New York have had front-row seats to the courts’ struggles to define the parameters of this defence of insanity. Until the 20th century, little was known about mental illness. Judging whether a person was deranged – seriously mentally ill and irrational – was seen as a matter for common knowledge. It was a case of ‘I know it when I see it,’ to echo the later words of the US judge Potter Stewart, who in 1964 was struggling to formulate a definition of hardcore pornography that would differentiate it from constitutionally protected speech.

deranged:[di'reindʒd] adj. 疯狂的                              pornography:[pɔ:'nɔgrəfi] n.色情作品, 色情描写

3. The courts tried to codify and standardise the construct of criminal insanity. By the 18th century, the commonly applied legal test in England was that a man should be found not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) if he is ‘totally deprived of his understanding and memory, and doth not know what he is doing, no more than an infant, than a brute, or a wild beast, such a one is never the object of punishment’. Animals ‘know’ what they are doing, of course, but they don’t know the moral dimension of it. The reasoning was that a person in the grips of mental illness should not be punished for illegal acts, if he or she doesn’t know that those acts are ‘wrong’, meaning against the laws of God as well as man, immoral as well as illegal.

NGRI: not guilty by reason of insanity 因精神错乱而无罪                                                                         doth: =does

4. The public demands, and the courts provide, a forum for identifying and punishing the wicked; in Western philosophical tradition, people are assumed to have free will, and therefore to be able to choose to do either good or evil. If they choose evil, it is right to punish them. The severely mentally ill were excused from punishment because, as St Augustine reasoned: ‘All men have freedom but it is restrained in children, in fools, and in the witless who do not have reason whereby they can choose the good from the evil.’

witless: adj.无知的；发疯的

5. Courts continued to waiver between holding any person guilty who ‘knew’ what he was doing, and holding to account only those who were morally aware of the wrongness of their action. The problem with this formula is that we tend to measure the wickedness of an actor by the degree of outrage we feel at the act. So, though the original spirit and intent of the insanity defence – to not punish those who, through no fault of their own, were driven by mental illness to commit illegal and immoral acts – remained clear, its application was inconsistent.

waiver:['weivə] v.放弃, 声明弃权

6. In the American colonies, courts swung between a good-versus-evil approach to criminal guilt, and a focus on the mental derangement of a defendant. In 1639, Dorothy Talbye was hanged in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for breaking the neck of her three-year-old daughter, named Difficult. Governor Winthrop says that Talbye ‘was so possessed with Satan, that he persuaded her (by his delusions, which she listened to as revelations from God) to break the neck of her own child’. The Puritans saw what was almost surely a severe case of postpartum depression as a choice to listen to the devil and do evil.

postpartum depression: [.pəust'pɑ:təm] 产后抑郁

7. But contrast this with the case of Mercy Brown in 1691 in Connecticut. She had a long history, well-known to the townsfolk, of being ‘crazed and distracted’, and when she murdered her child she was held by the jury to have been not in control of her own mental faculties. Though she was kept in custody ‘for preventing her doing the like or other mischief for the future’, she was spared the death penalty required for those convicted of murder.

8. Back in England, when Edward Oxford, an unemployed waiter with a history of mental disturbance, attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria in 1840 and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, the court ruled that ‘if some controlling disease was … the acting power within him which he could not resist, then he will not be responsible’. Similarly, when an impoverished, delusional, Scottish woodcutter named Daniel M’Naghten tried to assassinate the prime minister in 1843, killing instead the minister’s secretary, the judge instructed the jury at his murder trial that:

assassinate:[ə'sæsineit] v.行刺

9.    the question to be determined is, whether at the time the act in question was committed, the prisoner had or had not the use of his understanding, so as to know that he was doing a wrong or wicked act. If the jurors should be of opinion that the prisoner was not sensible, at the time he committed it, that he was violating the laws both of God and man, then he would be entitled to a verdict in his favour…

小注释: 紫底字为引用判决书或信件内容等(｡ì _ í｡)

10. M’Naghten was acquitted, but this case was a hinge point; Queen Victoria was incensed by M’Naghten’s acquittal. In a letter to the prime minister William Ewart Gladstone in 1882, she wrote: