Mental illness, Crime and Punishment:

Volume 2 Issues 7 July, 2021

Consultation Liaison Psychiatry Focus: Forensic Medicine

Introduction: The interface between mental health, mental illness and resulting criminal behavior is a complex cascade. The further interaction with police and the Judiciary is extremely challenging and most of the scope of this work lies within the specialist field of ‘forensic psychiatry’.

Mental illness: The mental illnesses arising from a structural brain damage are called organic psychoses and those with no neurological basis are called functional psychoses. Both are likely to lead to medico-legal consequences. The forensic aspects of such illnesses depend on the type and severity of the disease.

Mental Health Legislation and the Criminal Justice System: Every country has its own legislation that allows for the detention and treatment of individual offenders with a diagnosed mental disorder. The Mental Health Act, 1987, may be a reference document in this regard as applicable to India. Most legal systems across the globe have provisions for excusing an adult who, by reason of mental defect, commits a criminal act. Nevertheless, the nuance lies in determining the sufficient degree of mental abnormality to qualify for the exclusion from retribution of law.

Mental abnormality as a defence in court: The Latin phrase ‘actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea’, which translates ‘the act is not culpable unless the mind is guilty’, expresses a fundamental principle in many legal systems. The Law upholds that for every criminal act, there shall be a criminal mind and a mentally ill person may not have a sufficient degree of mental stability to achieve a criminal mind so as to design a criminal act.

Historical background: Daniel McNaughten was a Scotsman, who had a delusion of persecution. He believed that his life was in danger from the then Prime Minister’s political party. He decided to kill the Prime Minister of England, Sir Robert Peel. But with a mistaken identity, he shot dead, the Personal Secretary of the Prime Minister, Mr. Edward Drummond. McNaughten was found not guilty by the reason of insanity. A Bench of fourteen Judges gave the criteria for the criminal responsibility of the mentally ill, which was known as McNaughten’s Rules. The rule states that ‘to establish defence on the grounds of insanity, it must be clearly proved that at the time of commission of the act, the accused was laboring under such a defect of reason due to disease of mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he knew that, he did not know that it was wrong or contrary to the law’. The McNaughten’s rules have been the basis for evaluating a crime done by a mentally ill person in Indian Judiciary System, under Section 84 of the Indian Penal Code.

Conclusion: Retrospective analysis of mental illness is a morbid limitation in assessing the criminal responsibility of a mentally ill and it involves multidisciplinary approach. Increasing awareness about psychiatric conditions may benefit the society at large.

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