MENTALITY

NZ Truth, Issue 1187, 30 August 1928, Page 6

MENTALITY

We Moderns, and A Problem The legal test of insanity m England is that- the accused person is unable to know the nature and quality of the act which he is doing, or" if 'he does know, that he does hot know that it is wrong. YJJ7E have had our statutes consolidvv ated m New Zealand. Consolidated means sometimes "made niore hard." This consolidation m ' this country was done by a judge, and on the whole very well done indeed. The New Zealand law, however, provides that when the defence of insanity is set up, the burden of proof of sucli insanity rests on the prisoner. By implication and. practice it does so m England. In New Zealand it does so by statute. The New Zealand law requires "that the prisoner must prove that, by reason of natural imbecility or decay of his mental faculties he was unable to appreciate the nature and quality of the act or . omission with which' he is charged, " and . that he did not know that such an' act or omission, was wrong." This means that the prisoner must prove: — ■ 1. That he is naturally imbecile or mentally deficient. • 2. That he did not know what he was doing, or omitting to do. 3. That he did not know that he was doing 'wrong, or was wrong ih omitting to right. ..."■• 4. That (2) and (3) are jthe direct result of (1). „ The English test was devised 'in 1843 as a reply to. the over-success of a series of defences m capital cases on the ground of insanity. It has not been altered, either m England or here, since that date, except for the con-; solidation above mentioned. ; Since 1843, the whole of modern medicine, surgery, psychology, and , indeed all science, has been born. ■' The leading authority on mental diseases m 1843 would not-r-if -he were alive with only his 1843 . knowledgebe able to read tl\e index of a modern treatise on. his speciality and understand two decimals, live per cent. 61' the names m that index. . Still less would he be able to intelligently read much more than' the title, the publisher's, name, and — perhaps — the preface to the context. Of the context itself he .would be absolutely ignorant. . . „ This being so, it must be obvious that a law of. 1843. when slavery had not been abolished, when . married women had no separate property, and -when most men had no votes— to say nothing -of women's suffrage — must be a law which is out of date. lt is equally obvious that such a law must bear unduly hard on the mentally deficiept, on the degen- ( crate, and on all intellectually sub-standard folk if not actually on the ordinary person. Mr. Bumble' is perhaps obsolete also —he was created six years before this famous law — but at least one of his sayings, survives — "The law is a ass— a idiot." - - ■