INSANITY AND CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY.

This article presents a report of the committee "A" of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology." This committee was created at the second meeting of the Institute, held in Washington, D.C. in 1910, under a resolution which provided for the appointment of a committee to investigate the insane offender with a view, first, to ascertain how the existing legal rules of criminal responsibility can be adjusted to the conclusions of modern medical science and modern penal science, and secondly, to devise such amendments in the mode of legal proceedings as will best realize these principles and avoid current abuses. In 1911 this committee tentatively proposed the draft of a bill providing: First, a test of criminal responsibility when insanity is let up as a defense. Second. The procedure for determining this, and third, the disposition to be made of one who has been found to be insane so as not to be unusually responsible. This draft after much discussion was slightly amended the following year, and was again tentatively reported in the following form: Section 1, no person, suffering from mental disease, shall hereafter be convicted of any criminal charge, when at the time of the act or omission alleged against him, he did not have, by reason of such mental disease or derangement, the particular state of mind which must accompany such act or omission in order to constitute the crime charged.