¶1(dissenting). The issue on the plea of not guilty involved the question whether the defendant could act willfully, i. e., with malice aforethought, to use the ancient expression. Slight as the evidence might be as to the mental incapacity of the defendant, it was. in character the same as is presented in all cases where the defence is insanity. In such eases the question of guilt or innocence of the crime generally is always left to the jury. In the present case the trial judge withdrew the general question from the jury and permitted them only to deal with the degree of murder so far as the evidence relating to mental capacity is concerned, and he read from a charge of Justice Magie on the subject of the effect of drunkenness. Drunkenness is the voluntary act of the individual; there is no presumption and no evidence in this case that the mental incapacity of the defendant, if he was mentally incapable, was the result of his voluntary act. Whether or not he ¡was incapable was for the jury. To me the case of idiocy or mental incapacity is as .much for the jury on the question of criminal intent as in the case 'of insanity. Shocking as the case is, I cannot bring myself to sustain a conviction which I think is not based on a proper statement of the law. Justices Minturn and Kalisch concur m this dissent.
95 N.J.L. 145
State v. Schilling
Decided November 15, 1920
Supreme Court of New Jersey · decided 1920-11-15
<p>When a person twenty-eight years of age kills an officer to escape from arrest and sets up as a defence that he had not sufficient mentality to form in his mind an intent to take life, or to deliberate and determine to execute that intent by a premeditated act. the burden is on him to show his lack of sufficient mental j power to conceive and execute the crime. There is a vast difference between a child at the age of eleven years and that of a man of twenty-eight, and while perhaps there is a presumption that an infant of tender years is incapable of committing a crime that presumption does not extend to one of advanced years, requiring the state to rebut it. When a man readies manhood the presumption is that he possesses the ordinary mental capacity normally pertaining to his age, and it is for him to overcome that „ presumption, and whether he has done so is for the jury to de- ¡I termine. Deficiency of intellect is a species of insanity, and ' when that is set uj) as a defence for crime the burden is on the accused to prove it, the presumption being that he is sane.</p>
Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know
Decided 1920-11-15
How this case has been cited
Cited by 47 later decisions (8 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2007 · most notably Penry v. Lynaugh (1989), Fisher v. United States (1946)
39 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
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