Disordered Personalities and Crime

An analysis of the history of moral insanity

David W. Jones, David Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135050276
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Disordered Personalities and Crime seeks to better understand how we respond to those individuals who have been labelled at various points in time as 'morally insane', 'psychopathic' or 'personality disordered'. Individuals whose behaviour is consistent with these diagnoses present challenges to both the criminal justice system and mental health systems, because the people who come to have such diagnoses seem to have a rational and realistic understanding of the world around them but they can behave in ways that suggest they have little understanding of the meaning or consequences of their actions.

This book argues that an analysis of the history of these diagnoses will help to provide a better understanding of contemporary dilemmas. These are categories that have been not only shaped by the needs of criminal justice and the claims of expertise by professionals, but also the fears, anxieties and demands of the wider public. In this book, David W. Jones demonstrates us how important these diagnoses have been to the history of psychiatry in its claims for professional expertise, and also sheds light on the evolution of the insanity defence and helps explain why it remains a problematic and controversial issue even today.

This book will be key reading for students, researchers and academics who are interested in crime and its relationship to mental disorder and also for those interested in psychiatry and abnormal psychology.

Chapter 1

Informal insanity in the eighteenth-century court

Introduction

While notions of insanity have been accepted in legal systems for many centuries (Porter 2002), it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that courts were to see the entry of witnesses who were claiming expertise in insanity (Eigen and Andoll 1986; Smith 1981). As we shall see in the next chapter, the issue of moral insanity (and its various associated categories, such as monomania and partial insanity) was to be an important component of the claims made by the new profession of psychiatry as they staked out the territory of their expertise. This chapter makes the case that to understand the rise of these new experts we need to appreciate something of the demand that they were trying to fulfil. As will be discussed later in this chapter, Matthew Hale’s statement on criminal culpability and insanity, spelled out in seventeenth-century England but itself built on centuries of belief, seemed to demand very starkly that the accused might be excused only when ‘totally deprived of the use of reason’, and ‘their actions are in effect in the condition of brutes’ (Matthew Hale: The History of the Pleas of the Crown 1736: 31). The hypothesis behind this chapter is that the definitions of the new disorders of monomania and moral insanity that provided a challenge to this assertion were not simply conjured from thin air when they were described in the medical texts of the nineteenth century. Instead it is assumed that there would be evidence of similar thinking appearing earlier. In order to explore this pre-history a number of criminal trials from the latter half of the eighteenth century will be examined, in which the insanity of the accused was used as a defence but where that insanity was not obviously manifest and could not be simply characterised as an absence of reason.

The first part of the chapter will introduce the Old Bailey Sessions Papers as a significant historical record and present an analysis of a small number of cases tried at the Old Bailey in the second half of the eighteenth century. All of the cases emerged from a search of Old Bailey cases before the beginning of the nineteenth century where the insanity defence was used, but the insanity described seemed to challenge Hale’s definition. It is argued that there is considerable value in examining cases that were occurring before the language and assumptions of psychiatry had begun to obscure the view of some of the wider social processes that were troubling the courts. Cases of female offenders committing infanticide did appear in this trawl but have not been considered here. The specific case of female infanticide (mothers killing their own young children) is a particular issue that has its own history and has been extensively discussed elsewhere (e.g. Kramar and Watson 2006; Walker 1968: Chapter 7; Ward 1999; Zedner 1991). The remaining cases all concern male perpetrators directing fatal violence towards their wives. The gendered nature of these cases needs to be noted and carried through to the second part of this chapter which will be devoted to outlining some of the forces that were helping to shape the events taking place in the court. It will be argued that these cases are reflecting some important aspects of state formation. Most obviously they are occurring in a more centralised and specialised legal system that experienced pressure to intervene in crime, particularly in relation to male violence, and to provide solutions beyond capital punishment or deportation. At the same time, this was occurring in a society where there was greater interest in the emotional facets of relationships, which was prompting new ideas about the nature of insanity. This is an important period where the ground was being laid for the birth of psychiatry and the explosion of interest in monomania and moral insanity that was to take place in the first half of the nineteenth century; an interest that has continued (albeit in different guises) well into the twenty-first century.

1.1 The Old Bailey, the public sphere and new forms of insanity

The Old Bailey, situated in central London, was the court that hosted criminal trials for felony offences in the City of London and the surrounding county of Middlesex. Sessions were held eight times a year (Langbein 1983). The location of this court, which oversaw the dispensation of justice in the city that was experiencing the birth of the modern world (McKeon 1985; Ogborn 1998; Porter 2000) and the development of a modern legal system, was always going to give the Old Bailey a historical resonance (Langbein 1983). The fact that from 1674 a public record of the proceedings was made available reinforces the significance of the institution. What have become known as the Old Bailey Sessions Papers (OBSP) began to be published at this point in order to serve the general public’s appetite for details about crime and its punishment. The publication of the OBSP provided ‘one of the most widely read accounts of the criminal trial in eighteenth-century London’ and its influence was spread as it was plundered by other publications (Devereaux 2003: 57). They were published under licence of the Lord Mayor purely as a commercial and entrepreneurial exercise until 1775 when, given some alarm at the accuracy of the accounts, the Common Council for the City of London began to oversee their production and demand higher levels of detail and accuracy. From 1778 the OBSP were printed under the authority of the chief at the Old Bailey (Shoemaker 2008). The regulation of the OBSP was, Devereaux argues, in part driven by anxiety about rising crime levels and the subsequent ‘desire to reconfirm the legitimacy of the law in the eyes of the public, whilst simultaneously holding out the promise of the severest possible punishment to convicted criminals’ (Devereaux 2003: 59). Nevertheless, as with any historical account, care needs to be taken not to assume that the OBSP represent a straightforwardly accurate record of events in the courtroom (Shoemaker 2008). Produced to make a profit, the records needed to provide a certain amount of entertainment. They were often brief and selective in what they reported, particularly before being brought under tighter regulation in 1775. Despite the accuracy and detail increasing considerably after this point, Shoemaker still cautions that they were serving the two purposes of reassuring the public that crime was being controlled and getting the message to ‘the criminal classes’ that their crimes would be punished. The picture painted by the OBSP for much of the time is ‘of incorrigible offenders who met their just deserts after a substantial career’ (Lemmings 2012: 27). Most of the use of the OBSP made here and in the following chapter is with those trials occurring after 1775. While the detail provided gives some reason to be assured of a measure of accuracy, it might also be argued that in another sense the absolute accuracy of the OBSP is not a major concern for us here. The papers themselves are both symptomatic and constituent of the public sphere (as discussed in the Introduction) that was to become so important in shaping the modern world (Habermas 1989). The rhetorical message and purpose of the accounts of trials where sanity was the subject of debate is perhaps precisely what is most interesting about them. Even after it had the Old Bailey’s official approval, and needed to be viewed as an accurate account, it was still an entrepreneurial project that needed to pander to popular taste to an extent (see Devereaux 2003 for details of how the publication was put together and the methods of recording). By the late eighteenth century newspapers were also independently producing detailed accounts and getting them to the public far more quickly. The bias towards salacious and violent offences was very clear in newspapers (King 2009). Four different trials, taking place over a 32-year period, will now be reviewed. They all involve male violence fatal to female partners, and in each case the sanity of the perpetrator was in question in the court. None of the trials involved expert medical witnesses commenting on insanity.

1.1.1 Robert Finch (1754): motive, reason and ostensive madness

Robert Finch stood trial at the Old Bailey¹ in 1754 for the murder of his wife in Ludgate debtors’ prison, where he had been an inmate on a number of occasions. Most inmates of debtors’ prisons were there because a creditor had applied to have them locked up until they had paid their debt. At this point in history, before prison was the mainstay of the punishment system, such prisoners typically formed a significant proportion of the prison population (Woodfine 2006). Conditions were not pleasant, but inmates were allowed to buy their own provisions and visitors were freely allowed. It was during such a visit from his wife that Finch killed her with a knife, cutting her throat in such a way that her head was almost removed. The account of the trial itself is quite brief, as this was in the years before the OBSP were professionalised (Shoemaker 2008). It was easy for the court to establish that Finch killed his wife; he made a full confession at the time and did not retract it. He was very distressed and had tried to hang himself repeatedly that night. Witnesses in the prison testified that Finch himself claimed the motive of jealousy, saying that ‘he would do it, was it to do again, sooner than any man should enjoy his wife’ (OBSP 17 July 1754). It was also testified that Finch had, during his stay in prison, never seemed ‘to be disordered in his mind, there were no signs of lunacy … he appeared as a man in his senses; and that he was very well respected by the whole house’. Finch ‘said nothing in his own defence’ but called a number of male witnesses who knew him from a career on sailing ships as character witnesses. They testified that ‘he went by the name of mad Finch or crazy Finch, and was looked upon as a lunatick or frensical man on board’. There is more detail in the Ordinary’s account² published after the trial, which tells of a 35-year-old man who had a somewhat unstable life and career and at times had been ‘out of his mind’. On that night, according to Finch himself, Elizabeth was there to tell him that she was going away and this ‘worked him up to such a pitch of anger (which is by some justly defined by the expression of A short madness) as cost them both their lives’. He loved his wife ‘to distraction, but that fiend of hell, jealousy, had also taken possession of his mind, by which means he was hurried to the atrocious act of murdering her, on whom he owns he chiefly depended for support’ (OBSP Ordinary’s account).³ So although language like ‘possession’ or ‘fiend of hell’, and even ‘short madness’ is used, these are not words of mitigation at all. They are perhaps quite the reverse for, far from excusing the crime, the emphasis on the ‘pitch of anger’, or the strength of the feeling of jealousy involved, provided an explanation as to why he did it. As Eigen (1998) notes, using the crime of infanticide (which had a long history of being excused) as a common example, it was the absence of motive that itself was seen as providing crucial evidence of the insanity. In this case the Ordinary’s account describes ‘his hand, impelled by a passion, which, when once entertained, requir’s vigilant care to prevent, and guard against the furies by which it is haunted’.⁴ Finch’s failure to control his extreme passion was effectively an explanation for the crime and his failure to control his passion sent him to the gallows. The case emphasises a number of connected issues concerning gender, passion, violence and sanity. This male violence directed at his partner is condemned by the court. The claims, from friends and colleagues, of signals of insanity in the life of the accused are set aside. Instead what seems to drive the verdict is an ancient model of the relationship between sanity, reason and passion. As discussed later in this chapter (see pp. 41–44), the assumption that if a person has their reason then they are account able for their acts, no matter the strength of the feelings they have that drive them to action, is an ancient one that can be traced back to Plato at least (Robinson 1971).

Another case where a man killed his wife was tried a few years later, in 1761, at the Old Bailey. In this case the motive appears to be less clear. While the lack of clarity about the motive does not save him from the gallows, there appears to be considerable unease about the verdict. This unease is fully revealed in the Ordinary’s account⁵ which seems to play a role far removed from that of a corrective morality tale; instead the Ordinary seems to be using the publication to raise awareness and perhaps promote discussion about the nature of insanity and criminal culpability.

1.1.2 Richard Parrott (1761):⁶ the ‘subtilty and craft’ of insanity?

Richard Parrott was an elderly, rather deaf, man who was accused of murdering his wife of thirty years, with whom he shared the parentage of seven children (Whitehall Evening Post 22 October 1761). They lived in the parish of Harmansworth (now Harmondsworth, part of the outer London Borough of Hillingdon), then a small town outside London, although it was well connected, being just off the ‘Bath Road’. It was not disputed that on the morning of 20 September, Richard Parrott attacked his wife. He told the arresting constable that ‘she had told a great many lies of him, and he took a piece of her tongue off, that she should tell no more’. In court his only defence was that he was scared of her and that she had threatened to shoot him. There were two issues for the court to decide: did Anne Parrott die of the injuries inflicted by her husband, and was he sane and therefore responsible? The case was reported in the press in such a way that suggested little hesitation and was brutal in its conclusion:

Yesterday morning about, Nine o’clock, the Trial of Richard Parrott, for the murder of his wife, by partly cutting out her tongue, came on at the Old Bailey; It lasted upwards of three hours, when the jury brought him in guilty. He immediately received Sentence to be executed next Monday at Tyburn, and his body hung in chains. On Hounslow Heath, near where the Fact was committed. He had been married upwards of 30 years, and had by her seven children, which are all living.

(Whitehall Evening Post 22 October 1761)

The report provides a salutatory and very public warning of the evil of this act. Richard Parrott had cruelly killed his wife, and for this crime he was to be executed and his body publicly hanged in chains near to where the couple had lived, until it had decayed. The press report has no space for any of the doubt and even sorrow that surrounded the case, as revealed by the detailed account in the OBSP. There was witness evidence that Richard Parrott’s mind was disturbed. Parrott’s son, who lived some miles away in Richmond (to the south west of London), reported to the court that two months earlier he had been called to visit his parents and his mother had told him: ‘your father is out of his mind, and I am frightened out of my wits, fearing something should happen’. Parrott’s son went on to report:

My father seemed to be concerned about something, he told me people came after him to kill him; and my mother told me he ran away, and hid himself in a grove … my father told me my mother had poisoned him, and that she had dressed his cloaths with poison; my mother said he had cut his cloaths to pieces, and buried them.⁷

A witness to these conversations confirmed that ‘she was almost afraid to live with him, he got up at odd hours, and ran about, and conceited people were coming to kill him, and seemed out of his mind’. Despite this evidence of the presence of madness and the lack of clear motive, Parrott was found guilty. A number of factors might help us understand the guilty verdict. The court may well have been swayed by the fact that the attack was a very brutal and sustained one. The unfortunate Anne suffered an agonising death, taking seventeen days to die. It might also be significant that the last witness statements that are reported in the OBSP before the verdict present the view that Richard Parrott did ‘know right from wrong’:

Q.	Have you heard what Cox the witness and the son have said?
Haines	(the local Constable^8 who had arrested Parrott): I have, but I know nothing of it; I never saw the prisoner do any act of lunacy.
Q.	How did he behave under your care? Haines: He behaved very sensibly and well.
Q.	Did you ever hear from the neighbours that he was out of his senses?
Haines:	There was some talk of what this young man speaks of; but as to the truth of it, I can say nothing to that.
Q.	Was the prisoner capable of knowing good from evil while under your care?
Haines:	He was.
Q.	to West (a neighbour): Do you think he was capable of knowing good from evil?
West:	I believe at the time he did it, he did not think he should be hanged for it; but he knew what he did.

In many ways this verdict is consistent with the view that it is the complete absence of reason that is crucial to the defence of insanity. The emphasis that the neighbour puts on ‘knowing good from evil’ suggests a cognitive view of insanity, a view that was to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: excavating moral insanity
• 1 Informal insanity in the eighteenth-century court
• 2 The medical discourse of ‘moral insanity’
• 3 The rise of psychiatry in the post-M’Naghten years
• 4 Culture and moral insanity: selfhood and social degeneration
• 5 Moral imbecility: feeblemindedness and the road to eugenics
• 6 Psychopathy in the US: psychiatry, psychoanalysis and sexual selves
• 7 Social formulations of psychopathy and therapeutic communities
• 8 DSM and the proliferation of personality disorders
• 9 Shifting grounds: the mass media and the insanity defence
• 10 Concluding discussion: the contemporary debates: policy, theory and treatment
• References
• Subject index
• Author index