Academic literature on the topic 'Daniel McNaughton'

The issue of crime and insanity in Victorian Britain is dominated by the 1843 case of Daniel McNaughton. Hounded by paranoid delusions, about which he was relatively unforthcoming despite detailed questioning, he succeeded in shooting Henry Drummond, private secretary to the Prime Minister, Robert Peel. Thinking that it was Peel himself he had shot, McNaughton is quoted by the arresting policeman as stating “he shall break my peace of mind no longer”. The furore over his trial and non-execution filtered down the century, via the McNaughton rules. Daniel himself mouldered in Bethlem and Broadmoor for the rest of his days (West & Walk, 1977, esp. p. 93). But much more prevalent in the public's eye were the seven (at least) serious assaults on the Queen. Not only did they bring about a new criminal charge (vide infra) – but their recurrence tended to promote pro-royalist sympathies as well as pro-custodial attitudes towards “the insane”.

The McNaughton rules for determining whether a person can be successfully defended on the grounds of mental incompetence were determined by a committee of the House of Lords in 1843. They arose as a consequence of the trial of Daniel McNaughton for the killing of Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel's secretary. In retrospect it is clear that McNaughton suffered from schizophrenia. The successful defence of McNaughton on the grounds of mental incompetence by his advocate Sir Alexander Cockburn involved a profound shift in the criteria for such a defence, and was largely based on the then recently published ‘scientific’ thesis of the great US psychiatrist Isaac Ray, entitled ‘A treatise on the medical jurisprudence of insanity’. Subsequent discussion of this defence in the House of Lords led to the McNaughton rules, still the basis of the defence of mental incompetence in the courts of much of the English-speaking world. This essay argues that the rules need to be reconsidered in the light of the discoveries of cognitive neuroscience made during the 160 years since Ray's treatise. It is shown, for instance, how the conflation of ‘the power of self-control’ with ‘irresistible impulse’ by Cockburn is not supported by cognitive neuroscience because these are separate capacities requiring normal activity in distinct brain structures for their expression. In this way cognitive neuroscience assists in distinguishing between different capacities. It is further shown that failure of appropriate restraint in the expression of a capacity can be related to failure of synapses in particular parts of the brain. This raises the question as to what level of synaptic loss will the legislature and the courts rule as sufficient for a subject to be no longer held responsible for their lack of restraint.

The major novelists of the Victorian era enjoyed a large readership amongst the general public. They dealt with the pressing social issues of the day and their work both reflected and shaped society's attitudes to contemporary problems. The 19th century saw fundamental changes in society's response to the mentally ill with the creation of purpose-built asylums throughout the country. The Victorians were ambivalent in their reaction to the mentally disturbed. Whilst they sought to segregate the insane from the rest of the population, they were also terrified by the prospect of the wrongful confinement of sane people. The trial of Daniel McNaughton in 1843 for the assassination of Sir Robert Peel's Private Secretary, and the subsequent legislation, provoked general public debate about the nature of madness.