FWD [forteana] 19th-century British standard known as the M'Naghten rule
Terry W. Colvin
Insanity defense hard to prove in Minnesota Paul Gustafson, Star Tribune
Published August 7, 2003
It is difficult in any state for mothers such as Mine A. Ener, who was charged
Tuesday in St. Paul with murdering her 6-month-old daughter, to use postpartum
depression as the basis for an insanity defense, experts say.
But nowhere is an insanity defense more difficult to win than in Minnesota,
which uses a
19th-century British standard known as the M'Naghten rule. It says only people
who do not know right from wrong or who do not understand the nature of their
acts can be found not guilty by reason of mental illness.
That means it would be almost impossible to use postpartum depression as a
defense in Minnesota unless the depression caused severe psychotic reactions
such as delusional beliefs, said Eric Janus, a professor at William Mitchell
College of Law in St. Paul.
Because M'Naghten sets standards only for what a person understood, it does not
take into consideration illnesses such as postpartum depression, which is
considered an impairment of mood, Janus said.
According to a criminal complaint, Ener told police she killed her daughter,
Raya Donagi, because the girl had Down syndrome, Ener felt the infant's
situation was hopeless and she did not want her to go through life suffering.
Ener also said she had been contemplating suicide for the past two to three
weeks.
Ener appeared in Ramsey County District court briefly Wednesday and was granted
a three-week continuance to hire a private attorney.
Ener looked dazed but paused to make eye contact with five family members,
including her husband, Ron Donagi, before being led back to jail. She is being
held on $500,000 bail and agreed to waive speedy trial rules. She is scheduled
to be back in court Aug. 27. Family members declined to comment.
Outdated law?
Sigmund Freud was 12 years old when the Minnesota Supreme Court adopted the
M'Naghten rule in 1868.
Since then, modern psychology and psychiatry came into being, and their
practitioners often take the witness stand in courtrooms to offer expert
testimony.
But the M'Naghten rule, the product of an 1843 British murder case, is still the
law in Minnesota. Experts agree it is the most difficult of several insanity
standards used across the country.
In Minnesota, said Bruce Hanley, a Minneapolis criminal defense attorney, "you
see very few insanity defenses tried, and very few succeed. I've been practicing
law for 28 years, I have asserted it probably five times, and I have never been
successful with a jury."
About half of the states use insanity standards that permit a finding of not
guilty for people who commit crimes because of an "irresistible impulse" --
those who could not stop themselves from committing a crime due to mental
illness even when they knew it was wrong.
Other than defense lawyers, the most outspoken critics of the M'Naghten rule in
Minnesota have been judges. In fact, the Minnesota Supreme Court said 30 years
ago that M'Naghten "should have been discarded with the horse and buggy."
Prosecutors who defend the rule say that asking whether M'Naghten is based on
outdated science is the wrong question.
"I actually agree that M'Naghten doesn't reflect the way that modern psychology
thinks about mental illness. M'Naghten isn't answering a mental health question.
It's answering the question of when should society hold somebody criminally
responsible for an act," said Paul Scoggin, managing attorney of the Hennepin
County attorney's office violent crimes division.
"There are a bunch of interests M'Naghten is serving that psychologists don't
have to care about. They are societal . . . moral questions rather than
psychiatric," Scoggin said.
Although they're often critical of M'Naghten, state judges agree that it's out
of their hands. The state Supreme Court has consistently ruled that only
legislators can change M'Naghten, which is now embodied in a state law. And
legislators have shown little interest in doing that.
Former state Sen. Allan Spear, a Minneapolis DFLer who served as Crime
Prevention Committee chairman for 18 of his 28 years in the Senate, said
suggestions to look at other insanity standards have seldom come up, and gone
nowhere when they were made.
Expanding the Minnesota insanity standard to include "irresistible impulses" as
a defense "is not the fight I would pick right now," Spear said.
Critics abound
In 1989, Peggy Ann Barsness, a 24-year-old woman with the mental capacity of a
13-year-old who suffered from postpartum depression and alcoholism, abandoned
her infant daughter in their Burnsville home and went to visit her fiancé in San
Francisco.
The infant died before Barsness returned, and she was charged with murder. Her
attorney, Rick Mattox, sought to call psychiatrists and psychologists to testify
that Barsness' postpartum depression made it impossible for her to form the
intent to kill her daughter.
Dakota County District Judge Thomas Murphy denied Mattox's request, ruling that
under M'Naghten rule only persons who do not know right from wrong or who do not
understand their acts can mount an insanity defense.
Then, Murphy blasted the Legislature for keeping Minnesota's insanity law
"literally in the Dark Ages of psychiatry."
Murphy ruled, however, that only legislators could change the rule.
Barsness was sentenced to 15 years in prison. She was released in 1999 after
serving two-thirds of the sentence.
Defense attorneys point out that those defendants who successfully use the
insanity defense often are committed to the Minnesota Security Hospital in St.
Peter, and can be held indefinitely.
Naomi Gaines, the St. Paul woman who was charged with the murder of one of her
twin sons after throwing both into the Mississippi River during the Taste of
Minnesota Celebration on July 4, is at the hospital for a mental evaluation and
is due back in court Friday. She has not yet entered a plea in her case.
Several European countries take postpartum depression into account in their
criminal justice systems and automatically treat the deaths of infants at the
hands of their mothers in the first year of life as the equivalent of
manslaughter, a lesser crime than murder, Mattox said.
But he holds out little hope that the M'Naghten rule will be changed either by
Minnesota judges or legislators. "We're not a humanistic society. We're a very
crass society," he said.
Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom, who prosecuted Barsness, defends the
M'Naghten standard. "I think it's a long-standing and appropriate way to
evaluate the capacity of a criminal defendant. It works well," he said.
Questions about a defendant's diminished mental capacity can be dealt with at
the time of sentencing, Backstrom said, noting that Barsness received a shorter
sentence than recommended by state guidelines.
Olmsted County District Judge Ancy Morse similarly criticized but upheld the
M'Naghten rule in 1989 in the case of David Brom, a 17-year-old sentenced to
life in prison for the murdering his father, mother, sister and brother in their
suburban Rochester home.
Brom's attorney wanted to call psychiatrists to testify that Brom might not have
been able to restrain himself because of the effects of severe depression.
Morse, now retired, wrote in her 1989 decision that "Minnesota is ripe and due
for change in the mental illness defense, in order to be in touch with current
advances and knowledge in psychiatry and psychology."
Difficult defense
Under any current standard, mounting a successful insanity defense is difficult,
says psychiatrist Carl Malmquist, because "most courts and juries aren't going
to believe that [a defendant] didn't know what they were doing."
Malmquist, a University of Minnesota professor of social psychology, was a
longtime psychiatric consultant appointed by Hennepin County District Court
judges to examine criminal defendants' mental condition.
"The diagnosis is only the door opener. You then have to demonstrate more
specific symptoms, and then take it to a third level: how those symptoms
specifically controlled a person's behavior at the time. That's what makes [an
insanity defense] very difficult even if you have an [irresistible impulse]
standard," Malmquist said.
"In the great majority of cases where a defendant is found to be mentally ill,
it's because the prosecutor has agreed to it," he said.
Janus isn't sure that moving to an insanity standard that recognizes
"irresistible impulses" as a defense would have much practical effect.
Some studies using mock juries have found that they relied more on their
intuition and common sense than on the specific wording of an insanity standard
in reaching a decision, he said.
"I think M'Naghten is unnecessarily restrictive," Janus said. "I have a lot of
faith in the . . . common sense of jurors to understand when mental illness is
so severe that it [affects a person's culpability]. I think I'd be more inclined
to try to tap that commonsense directly, rather than using [standards] which are
hard to understand."
But Scoggin argues that expanding the Minnesota insanity standard to include
"irresistible impulses" is a bad idea.
"It becomes so amorphous and so doubtful to determine something is an
irresistible impulse," he said. "Society needs a much more concrete test [for
insanity]. A lot of what we deal with [in the criminal justice system] is the
product of mental illness."
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