Feigned insanity in nineteenth-century America: Tactics, trials, and truth (original) (raw)
“A Fool For His Client:” Religion, Law, and Insanity in Nineteenth-Century America
2021
When Charles Guiteau killed U.S. President James Garfield, he claimed that God had ordered him to do so. During his trial, Guiteau’s lawyers plead not guilty by reason of insanity, and the question of Guiteau’s innocence or guilt quickly became a question about the very nature of insanity itself. In late nineteenth-century America, the concept of insanity was the subject of constant academic debate, with early psychiatrists arguing whether it was caused by physical disease, moral weakness, or even radical forms of Christianity. I use the trial of Charles Guiteau as a case study of the evolving conceptualizations of mental illness in the Gilded Age. I also examine the role that the insanity debate played in shaping nineteenth-century American psychiatry, and the implications that it had on the role of the insanity defense in American law.
The Insanity Defense: Nine Myths that Will Not Go Away
2016
Writing about the insanity defense over a quarter of a century ago, the author of this chapter stated: "Until we 'unpack' the empirical and social myths that underlie our misconceptions about the insane and the insanity defense and hold us in a paralytic thrall, we cannot begin to move forward." Some five years later, he began a full-length book on the insanity defense by alleging, "Our insanity defense jurisprudence is incoherent." Five years after that, he concluded that "we as a society remain fixated on the insanity defense as a symbol of all that is wrong with the criminal justice system and as a source of social and political anger." Returning to this issue two years ago, he concluded that "nothing has happened in the intervening decade to lead me to change my mind." The myths have stayed with us, and we willfully blind ourselves to the empirical and behavioral realities.At the roots of this incoherence and fixation is our nation...
The Rorschach Test and Forensic Psychological Evaluation: Psychosis and the Insanity Defense
2016
No area of the legal system and mental health law is more controversial than the question of criminal responsibility and the insanity defense. Societies have wrestled with how to hold individuals responsible for actions who have committed crimes when they were “out of their mind.” The commission of a criminal act, particularly a heinous crime that outrages the sensibilities of the community, generates demands for retribution. Nevertheless, legal systems since antiquity have made allowances for individuals who were “insane,” by whatever definition was culturally relevant and current at the time. Because the majority of criminal defendants acquitted by reason of insanity are diagnosed as psychotic (Melton, Petrila, Poythress, & Slobogin, 1997), the chief focus here is on “psychosis.” It needs to be emphasized that psychosis is not simply tantamount to insanity, as will be seen in the discussion of criteria for the insanity defense. This chapter reviews fundamental legal constructs con...
A short study on madness between psychiatry and the law. Part 1. Abstract This paper presents a comparative history of paranoia querulans, also known as litigants' delusion, in German--speaking countries and France from the nineteenth century onwards. We first focus on two classic literary works which describe litigious behaviours later pathologised, then give insight into the history of Querulantenwahn (litigants' delusion), a term coined in 1857 by Johann Ludwig Casper and adopted by German--speaking psychiatrists and forensic experts. The last section is devoted to its French equivalent, the delusion of the litigious persecuted--persecutors. We show how this category, widely popular among French fin--de-siecle alienists, was replaced by another: the delusion of revendication (litigious subtype). The history of the vexatious litigants in the English--speaking world will be explored in the second part of this paper.