Insane Delusions

Insane Delusions

The two prongs of the test ask what a defendant understood about his act, yet many real insanity claims arrive as a delusion, meaning a fixed false belief about the facts that the defendant keeps despite all evidence against it. Delusions pose a special difficulty because they are often partial, and the M'Naghten judges addressed exactly that person: someone whose illness produces a false belief on one subject while the rest of the mind works normally.¹ Such a person usually knows what his hands are doing and knows that the law forbids killing, so applying the two prongs mechanically would convict him even when the belief he acted on would, if true, have made his conduct entirely proper. The judges answered that difficulty with a method. The delusion is taken as true for purposes of responsibility, and the question becomes whether the act would have been criminal on the facts as the defendant imagined them.²

The method comes from the judges' answer to the fourth question put to them by the House of Lords, an answer often overlooked because the second and third answers supply the famous right-and-wrong formula.³ Asked whether a person who commits an offense in consequence of an insane delusion as to existing facts is excused, the judges said he “must be considered in the same situation as to responsibility as if the facts with respect to which the delusion exists were real.”⁴ The standard restatement of the rule on insane delusions adds the qualifier that matters most on exams: a defendant who acted under an insane delusion, and was not otherwise insane, is accountable exactly as if the facts were as they seemed to him.⁵ The phrase “not otherwise insane” marks the territory of the rule. A defendant who already satisfies a prong, like the man who thinks he is squeezing lemons, has no need of it, so the method governs the person whose mind works normally except for one false belief.

Step 3 decides most stems, and it needs only enough justification doctrine to see whether the imagined facts would make the act a proper response. The real question is whether the delusion supplied a fact that would excuse the act or supplied only a reason for committing it.

The reason the rule takes this shape lies in what a partial delusion does to a mind. It corrupts the defendant's picture of the facts and leaves intact his grasp of what the law and morality forbid. A defendant who knows that killing a man for ruining his reputation is wrong has a delusion that explains why he acted, yet it removes nothing from his ability to tell that the act was wrong, so excusing him would excuse conduct that is wrong on any reading of the facts. A defendant whose delusion tells him that a man is at that moment trying to kill him is doing what a sane person would do if the delusion were true, so the delusion has taken away the very feature that made the act wrongful. Testing each defendant against the facts as he believed them lets the delusion excuse in the second case and keeps it from excusing in the first.

The judges' own illustration of the exempt defendant is a man who, under the influence of his delusion, supposes another to be in the act of attempting to take his life and kills that person in what he takes to be self-defense.⁶ On the assumed facts he stands where a person acting in lawful self-defense stands. The Model Penal Code commentary reaches the same place by way of deterrence, because a deranged person who kills in supposed self-defense on the basis of a delusion that another is attempting to kill him is plainly beyond the deterrent influence of the law, and condemning him would accomplish nothing.⁷ A defendant who hears command hallucinations insisting that the victim is trying to kill him belongs in the same group, since he believes he is killing in self-defense when he is not.⁸

The judges' contrasting illustration is a defendant deluded that the deceased had inflicted a serious injury on his character and fortune, who kills in revenge for that supposed injury and is liable to punishment.⁹ Assume the injury were real: no one may kill another for damaging his reputation or his finances, so the delusion explains why the defendant wanted the victim dead and excuses nothing. The judges' first answer reaches the same result for delusions aimed at redressing or revenging a supposed grievance, or at producing a supposed public benefit. A defendant who knew he was acting contrary to the law of the land remains punishable.¹⁰

M'Naghten's own illness fits this pattern. He believed that the Prime Minister was seeking to kill him, and he shot the Prime Minister's private secretary, Drummond, whom he took to be the Prime Minister.¹¹ He told the police that the Tories followed and persecuted him and that “they wish to murder me.”¹² The jury acquitted him by reason of insanity under a charge that asked whether he knew he was doing a wrong or wicked act, and the judges' answers, including the one on delusions, were delivered afterward in response to questions from the House of Lords.¹³ Run his belief through the method and it lands close to Okafor. A conspiracy of enemies who wish a person dead describes a hostile wish, and a wish with no attack under way would not make a killing lawful even if it were real. That result shows why the method is only one route to the defense. It sorts the partially deluded defendant by what his imagined facts would justify, and it leaves the two prongs available to any defendant whose defect of reason went further.

On an exam, the usual error is to treat a delusional motive as though it were a delusional fact. A familiar stem has a mentally ill defendant who believes that his wife is building a bomb in the basement to blow up the world. He knows he could be punished for murder, yet he pushes her down a flight of stairs to save the world. The delusion gives him a reason to act, and he understood both that the act was illegal and that it would probably kill, so in most states the delusion does not satisfy the test.¹⁴ Change what the delusion touches and the answer changes. A defendant who believes that a robot has impersonated his fiancée and strangles it to disable it has a delusion about what the act physically is, and if his account is credited he qualifies on the physical prong and on the wrongfulness prong as well.¹⁵ A different question arises when the defendant knows the act is illegal but, through delusion, believes it morally right, as when he believes God commanded it. That question turns on the meaning of “wrong,” which the sections on moral justification take up.¹⁶