Unsoundness of mind considered in relation to the question of responsibility for criminal acts / by Samuel Knaggs.

  • Samuel Knaggs
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Unsoundness of mind considered in relation to the question of responsibility for criminal acts / by Samuel Knaggs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    that our legislators should avail themselves thereof. The relation that should be maintained by an out- raged institution, towards the class of criminals of unsound mind, constitutes at the present moment, to the eye of the philosophic observer, that which the annals of jurisprudence show it to have been from time immemorial, a great stumbling block: the qucestio vexata of the past, the present, and it may be the future ; one, which it is wrong to leave, yet difficult to touch, so intricate and tortuous are its several bearings. The subject appeals with force and power to the sympathies as well as the minds of all; protection to life and property alone, is a principle in which every one is deeply interested, no matter what the rank or station he occupies in society; the blessings and the sweets of life and its belongings are as highly esteemed by the peasant in his lowly cot, perhaps even more so, than by the monarch on his throne. To ensure this protection to life and property, so far as can be effected by legislation, it becomes requisite to admit another principle, viz., that any offences against either the one or the other shall be visited with punishment. But it so happens that occasionally these offences are the result of a diseased and distempered mind, a condition to which every human being is more or less exposed ; and the folly and injustice of treating criminal sanity and insanity upon the same footing being too apparent, the law very properly reco- gnises irresponsibility in consequence of mental b 2
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