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The M'Naghten rule(s) (pronounced, and sometimes spelled, McNaughton) is a legal test defining the defence of insanity that was formulated by the House of Lords in 1843. It is the established standard in UK criminal law.
Daniel M'Naghten. Photographed by Henry Hering c 1856. Daniel M'Naghten (sometimes spelt McNaughtan or McNaughton; 1813 – 3 May 1865) was a Scottish woodturner who assassinated English civil servant Edward Drummond while suffering from paranoid delusions.
The idea of insanity in English law dates from 1324, when the Statute de Praerogativa Regis allowed the King to take the lands of "idiots and lunatics." The early law used various words, including "idiot", "fool" and "sot" to refer to those who had been insane since birth, [2] and "lunatic" for those who had later become insane, or were insane with some lucid intervals. [3]
The M'Naghten Rules of 1843 were not a codification or definition of insanity but rather the responses of a panel of judges to hypothetical questions posed by Parliament in the wake of Daniel M'Naghten's acquittal for the homicide of Edward Drummond, whom he mistook for British Prime Minister Robert Peel. The rules define the defense as "at the ...
Schmidt, 216 N.Y. 324 (1915), is a British criminal case interpreting "wrong" in the M'Naghten rule for an insanity defense. [13]: 621 The M'naghten rule included that a person was not guilty because of insanity if, because of a mental disorder, the defendant was not able to know her act was wrong.
The insanity defense is a traditional affirmative defense that dates at least back to English common law.The codification of the M'Naghten rules, which have been referenced in one form or another in US law as well as UK law, indicates that someone may be found not guilty of a crime because of a mental condition which prevents them from either controlling their actions or from knowing whether ...
The insanity defence is recognized in Australia, Canada, England and Wales, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway and most U.S. states with the exception of Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Utah, and Vermont [6] but not all of these jurisdictions still use the M'Naghten Rules.
Justice Choo stated that language of the M'Naghten rules should be re-examined, because with the application of the M'Naghten rules, "legal insanity and medical insanity have not fitted themselves snugly in the same box" and it disregarded the fact that there were multiple varieties of mental illnesses which could lead to an abnormality of mind ...