Insanity

In Medical Jurisprudence. The prolonged departure, without any adequate cause, from the states of feeling and modes of thinlciug usual to the individual in health. Insanity is such a deprivation of reason that the subject is no longer capable of understanding and acting with discretion in the ordinary affairs of life.

Snyder v. Snyder, 142 111. 60, 31 N. E. 303.

Legal insanity, which exonerates from crime or incapacitates from civil action, is mental deficiency with reference to the particular act in question and not a general incapacity. It is the latter only as the result of judicial ascertainment that a person is non compos mentis, by inquisition in lunacy, or similar statutory proceeding, and this only results in a general civil disability and not, proprio vigore, in immunity from punishment for crime. It results that there can be no general definition of legal insanity. It is a state or condition which must be noted with reference to each class of actions to w’hich it is applied. In criminal law It “is any defect, weakness, or disease of the mind rendering it incapable of entertaining, or preventing its entertaining in the particular Instance, the criminal intent which constitutes one of the elements in every crime.”

1 Blsh. New Cr. L. § 381.

As a cause of civil incapacity it is such defect or weakness as prevents rational assent to a contract or due consideration of the facts properly and naturally entering Into the testamentary disposition of one’s estate. It Is a want of due proportion In quality or quantity, or both, — between the mental capacity and power and the particu- The legal and the medical ideas of insanity are essentially different, and the difference is one of substance. The failure to keep it hi mind has been the fruitful cause of confusion in trials involving the question of mental capacity for crime or contract, and has tended to render valueless and often absurd the testimony of witnesses called as experts. Many of these have testified without any conception of the real nature and definition of the insanity, which alone could have relation t6 the case. The distinction between the medical and the legal idea of insanity has, perhaps, not been better stated than by Ray, who is quoted by Ordronaux, and again by Witthaus & Becker: ^'Insanity in medicine has to do with a prolonged departure of the individual from his natural mental state arising from bodily disease.” ''Insanity in Iww covers nothing more than the relation of the person and the particular act which is the subject of judicial investigation. The legal problem must resolve itself into the Inquiry, whether there was mental capacity and moral freedom to do or abstain from doing the particular act” 1 Whltth. & Beck. Med. Jur. 181;