The Layman’s (Juror’s) Perspective on Insanity

Abstract

Insanity trials like Hinckley’s and M’Naghten’s have been high drama, public morality plays that provoke sound and fury. Headlining the cast of characters are the defendant and the victim,

while under the marquee, eminent jurists, lawyers, and psychological experts compete for center stage spotlight. The press, the public, and political leaders, an attentive, although not always an appreciative audience, follow the drama to its denouement and verdict.…

Upstaged and overshadowed by the more dramatis personae of the trial are the jurors, who are typically regarded as merely minor characters, when they are regarded at all. But all of that changes when these jurors bring in a nettlesome verdict; when that happens, the spotlight shifts, the jurors and their decision occupy center stage position, and the audience reacts—usually with a chorus of bewilderment, criticism, and ascriptions. The postscripts of two of history’s most celebrated insanity cases, M’Naghten (1843) and United States v. Hinckley (1981) illustrate this reaction. (Finkel, 1988, p. 97)