University of Miami Law School Institutional Repository University of Miami Law Review 5-1-2015 When God Demands Blood: Unusual Minds and the Troubled Juridical Ties of Religion, Madness, and Culpability Rabia Belt Follow this and additional works at:http://repository.law.miami.edu/umlr Recommended Citation Rabia Belt,When God Demands Blood: Unusual Minds and the Troubled Juridical Ties of Religion, Madness, and Culpability, 69U. Miami L. Rev.755 (2015) Available at: http://repository.law.miami.edu/umlr/vol69/iss3/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in University of Miami Law Review by an authorized administrator of Institutional Repository. For more information, please [email protected]. \\jciprod01\productn\M\MIA\69-3\MIA310.txt unknown Seq: 1 2-SEP-15 14:09 When God Demands Blood: Unusual Minds and the Troubled Juridical Ties of Religion, Madness, and Culpability RABIA BELT* “Why is it when we talk to God we’re said to be praying—but when God talks to us, we’re said to be schizophrenic?” Lily Tomlin1 The deific decree doctrine allows criminal defendants who believe that God commanded them to kill to plead not guilty by reason of insanity to murder. The insanity defense has remained moored to its Judeo-Christian roots, which has artificially limited its bounds. While civil law has focused on individualism within religion, criminal law has imposed state-defined limits on what religion (or socially acceptable religion) is. This article argues that the deific decree doc- trine is too closely tied to artificial limits on insanity imposed by nineteenth-century developments in the mental health profession and criminal law. The doctrine unacceptably privileges certain mentally ill criminal defendants whose delusions fit within an outdated model that is not psychiatrically valid. Moreover, it has disparate gender consequences that harm women with postpartum psychosis who kill their children while supporting men who kill their female partners. The article concludes by calling for the end of the deific decree doc- trine and expanding the insanity defense so it more accurately tracks psychiatric understanding of mental illness. I. INTRODUCTION ...................................................... 756 R II. EARLY CASES: 1843–1915 ............................................ 761 R III. THE LATENT PERIODOF DEIFIC DECREE: 1915–1983 ...................... 773 R A. Supreme Court Jurisprudence on Religion ........................... 773 R B. Mental Health Developments ...................................... 776 R IV. INSANITY DEFENSE GENERALLY ........................................ 780 R V. THE REEMERGENCEOF DEIFIC DECREE: 1983 TO PRESENT.................. 785 R * Assistant Professor, Stanford Law School; A.B., Harvard; J.D., University of Michigan Law School; Ph.D., University of Michigan. Thank you to Ethan Ard, Susanna Blumenthal, Nicolette Bruner, John Carson, Joseph Cialdella, Phil Deloria, Sam Erman, Dan Ernst, Aston Gonzalez, Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Greg Klass, Issa Kohler-Hausman, Paul Christopher Johnson, Leah Litman, Itamar Mann, Jonathan Metzl, Sherrally Munshi, Alexander Olson, Julia Silvis, David Super, Julia Tomassetti, Amy Uehlman, and Robin West for comments and encouragement. Previous versions of this article were presented at the University of Michigan American History Workshop and Georgetown University Law Center Fellows Workshop. 1. See Lily Speaks, LILY TOMLIN, http://classic.lilytomlin.com/lily/quotes.htm (last visited Feb. 28, 2015). 755 \\jciprod01\productn\M\MIA\69-3\MIA310.txt unknown Seq: 2 2-SEP-15 14:09 756 UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW [Vol. 69:755 A. Modern Jurisprudence............................................ 785 R B. Deific Decree’s Failure........................................... 790 R 1. BAD GODS .................................................. 790 R 2. BAD MOTHERSAND BAD HUSBANDS............................. 793 R VI. CONCLUSION ........................................................ 794 R I. INTRODUCTION When Robert Crenshaw and his wife were on their honeymoon in Canada in 1982, Robert got into a fight and was deported back to the United States.2 He found a motel room just across the border in Blaine, Washington and waited for his wife.3 Upon her arrival two days later, Robert had the immediate suspicion that she had been unfaithful, that “‘it wasn’t the same Karen . . . she’d been with someone else.’”4 Robert “took [his wife] to the motel room and beat her unconscious.”5 He then went to a store, stole a knife, and stabbed her twenty-four times.6 After stabbing her, Robert left his now-dead wife, drove to a farm where he had previously worked, and borrowed an ax.7 When he returned to the motel room, Robert decapitated Karen.8 After being apprehended by police, Robert voluntarily confessed and claimed that he thought it was his duty as a Moscovite to kill Karen, whom he believed had been unfaithful.9 At trial, the court faced a quan- dary: were Crenshaw’s actions religious or insane?10 And what did the answer say about his criminal responsibility?11 When Robert was appre- hended and charged with first-degree murder, he argued that he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.12 The case ultimately reached the Washington Supreme Court, which upheld his first-degree murder conviction.13 The dilemma divided the justices, who, like so many jurists before, struggled to draw sensible boundaries and bridges between faith, madness, and responsibility.14 The legal system was forced to grapple with a doctrine that was making its reappearance in 2. State v. Crenshaw, 659 P.2d 488, 490 (Wash. 1983). 3. Id. 4. Id. 5. Id. 6. Id. 7. Id. 8. Id. 9. See id. at 491, 494 (“Crenshaw argued only that he followed the Moscovite faith and that Moscovites believe it is their duty to kill an unfaithful wife. This is not the same as acting under a deific command. . . . Crenshaw’s personal ‘Moscovite’ beliefs are not equivalent to a deific decree and do not relieve him from responsibility for his acts.”). 10. See id. at 491. 11. See id. 12. See WASH. REV. CODE §9A.12.010 (West 2011); Crenshaw, 659 P.2d. at 491. 13. See Crenshaw, 659 P.2d. at 490. 14. See id. at 498–99, 502. \\jciprod01\productn\M\MIA\69-3\MIA310.txt unknown Seq: 3 2-SEP-15 14:09 2015] WHEN GOD DEMANDS BLOOD 757 criminal trials after a long absence: the doctrine of deific decree.15 Unusual minds that turn violent raise some of the most difficult questions of criminal responsibility. When aberrant thoughts take on a religious cast, the problem becomes even more complex, as judges must determine whether religious fervor has slipped into mental illness and what impact this mental state has on culpability. This article traces judi- cial attempts to navigate three paradigms for understanding abnormal thoughts—religion, psychiatry, and criminal law—by examining the 170-year history of a doctrine predicated upon their collision. The defense of deific decree holds that if God commanded a defendant to kill another person, then the defendant can successfully plead not guilty by reason of insanity to first-degree murder.16 Although the basic statement of the doctrine has changed little across its long existence, its operation and underlying theory have shifted considerably as the social, judicial, and scientific understandings of religion, mental illness, and criminality between which the doctrine mediates have themselves undergone transformations.17 Three stages animate this article. First, the emergence and early articulation of deific decree doctrine (1844–1915) illustrates the extent to which Christianity bound together judicial and psychiatric notions of religion, mental illness, and culpability during the formative years of what came to be the modern insanity defense. Second, in the nearly eight decades that followed, from 1915 to 1982, the judiciary expanded its conceptions of insanity and religion in ways that untethered mental ill- ness, culpability, and religion from Christian norms. These years saw the deific decree defense recede in deference to more capacious definitions 15. See id. at 494. 16. Murder is defined by degrees. First-degree murder is defined generally as an unjustified killing manifesting purpose and intent to cause death or a killing during the course of a major felony. See JOHN KAPLANETAL., CRIMINAL LAW: CASESAND MATERIALS 291 (5th ed. 2004). In deific decree cases, the defendant is not challenging that he caused the death of another or that he intended to do so; it is why the defendant caused the death that is at issue. See Crenshaw, 659 P.2d at 494. It is important to note that a finding of not guilty by reason of insanity is different than an acquittal by another defense. In an acquittal, the defendant is free to go, while the state can retain custody of a legally insane defendant until he or she is deemed not a danger to society. See RALPH SLOVENKO, PSYCHIATRY IN LAW/LAW IN PSYCHIATRY 217 (2d ed. 2009). Thus, a legally insane defendant potentially could remain committed longer than he could be imprisoned if found legally sane and guilty. See id. 17. Though it may seem to be a quirky exception, deific decree has received extensive discussion in case law and casebooks. See, e.g., Wilson v. Gaetz, 608 F.3d 347, 354 (7th Cir. 2010) (Judge Posner discussing the doctrine of deific decree); Ivery v. State, 686 So. 2d 495, 500–02 (Ala. Crim. App. 1996); People v. Serravo, 823 P.2d 128, 139 (Colo. 1992); State v. Wilson, 700 A.2d 633, 641 (Conn. 1997); State v. Worlock, 569 A.2d 1314, 1322 (N.J. 1990); State v. Rice, 757 P.2d 889, 904 (Wash. 1988); State v. Cameron, 674 P.2d 650, 654 (Wash. 1983); GARY MELTONETAL., PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATIONSFORTHE COURTS: A HANDBOOKFOR MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONALSAND LAWYERS 215 (3d ed. 2007). \\jciprod01\productn\M\MIA\69-3\MIA310.txt unknown Seq: 4 2-SEP-15 14:09 758 UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW [Vol. 69:755 of insanity. Third, as the insanity defense narrowed following the 1982 acquittal of John Hinckley by reason of insanity for shooting Ronald Reagan, deific decree defenses reemerged.18 These twinned develop- ments illuminate the extent to which the Court’s reinterpretation of reli- gion as a personal choice put faith on a collision course with culpability—and the free will presumed to underlie it. The protagonists of this history are the experts. As judges who spe- cialize in questions of culpability have confronted defendants who per- ceive otherworldly commands, they have had to make choices about the extent to which they will draw on and defer to theologians and psychia- trists. As the mental health field professionalized and courts increasingly sought to avoid entanglement with religion, judges asked psychiatrists to carry more of the burden of explanation within the judicial system, and psychiatrists willingly accepted. Ironically, as psychiatrists increasingly claimed the ability to map out normal and abnormal human behavior, their skill at capturing the impact of religion and culture on behavior diminished. As expert mental-health testimony became pervasive, it pro- vided ever less guidance to judges seeking to navigate religious compul- sion and culpability. Discussing religion as a concern of criminal law rather than as the subject of First Amendment litigation relieves the tensions that this arti- cle explores. Too often, baroque First Amendment doctrine encourages scholars to treat collisions between law and religion as doctrinal brainteasers solvable through clever analysis rather than as emblematic of deep, unresolvable tensions. Here, the criminal context makes visible how legal conceptions of religion respond to and collide with shifts in popular ideas and expert knowledge. Although modern First Amend- ment law seeks to construct a firm divide between rationalist legal rea- soning and humanistic religious faith, this neat dichotomy collapses in deific decree cases. Courts cannot evaluate deific decree claims without consideration of defendants’ beliefs. Defendants and their lawyers encourage this entanglement by renouncing claims that the killer was a modern-day Joan of Arc on a prophetic divine saintly mission that has a rational basis. Instead, they argue that the defendant both believed him- self compelled to act by divine instruction and that the defendant’s per- ception of that divine instruction was mistaken and insane. This article proceeds as follows. Part II examines the origins of deific decree doctrine, which was christened into U.S. law by the Massa- chusetts Supreme Court in 1844. The same case that introduced the 18. See Deborah Denno, Who is Andrea Yates? A Short Story About Insanity, 10 DUKE J. GENDER L. & POL’Y 1, 13 (2003); Lisa Callahan et al., Insanity Defense Reform in the United States—Post-Hinckley, 11 MENTAL & PHYSICAL DISABILITY L. REP. 54, 55 (1987). \\jciprod01\productn\M\MIA\69-3\MIA310.txt unknown Seq: 5 2-SEP-15 14:09 2015] WHEN GOD DEMANDS BLOOD 759 deific decree doctrine to the United States also spawned the “right- wrong” test that deemed defendants insane if at the time of doing the act they did not know the difference between right and wrong.19 Deific decree, therefore, operated from the outset in relation to the right-wrong test—its better-known fraternal twin.20 The right-wrong test represented an exception to the general criminal law presumption that people exer- cise free will and so can be held responsible for their illegal behavior. Depending upon the court, the test has been understood to require that a defendant be unable to comprehend either the illegality of his actions or the social opprobrium that others will attach to them. Deific decree also covered a potential third case: the defendant who felt compelled by divinity to act despite knowing that doing so would bring legal sanction and societal condemnation.21 Explicitly framed in Judeo-Christian terms—the doctrine requires an order from God, not a supernatural entity in general—deific decree reflected the prevailing sentiment among leading Americans that divine law reigned supreme above human law.22 For psychiatrists still seeking to establish themselves within their field, the expansion of the insanity defense presented opportunities; defendants who might become patients of their asylums, forums in which to appear as high-profile experts, and audiences for their theories linking mental illness and sin. Such testi- mony, in turn, reassured jurists that criminality would beget punishment. Divine lawbreakers, psychiatric testimony reassured, were punished by God with the affliction of madness, would face confinement in institu- tions, and often suffered internally for having committed violent acts. Judges’ almost pathological rehearsals of the story of Abraham and Isaac—and their grim imaginings of the consequences of a sacrifice not aborted by God—further emphasized jurists’ concern that bad acts not go unpunished. Part III traces three transformations in the law and science of 19. See Commonwealth v. Rogers, 48 Mass. (7 Met.) 500, 502–03 (1844) (“In these cases, the rule of law, as we understand it, is this: A man is not to be excused from responsibility, if he has the capacity and reason sufficient to enable him to distinguish between right and wrong, as to the particular act he is then doing; a knowledge and consciousness that the act he is doing is wrong and criminal, and will subject him to punishment. In order to be responsible, he must have sufficient power of memory to recollect the relation in which he stands to others, and in which others stand to him; that the act he is doing is contrary to the plain dictates of justice and right, injurious to others, and a violation of the dictates of duty.”). 20. See id. 21. See id. at 503 (describing two situations in which an insane delusion might excuse a criminal act, including “where he [the defendant] fully believes that the act he is doing is done by the immediate command of God, and he acts under the delusive but sincere belief that what he is doing is by the command of a superior power”). 22. See id. (describing the command of God as that which “supersedes all human laws, and the laws of nature”). \\jciprod01\productn\M\MIA\69-3\MIA310.txt unknown Seq: 6 2-SEP-15 14:09 760 UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW [Vol. 69:755 religion and madness. Beginning in 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court aban- doned its longstanding identification of religion with Judeo-Christian principles in favor of a focus on individual moral choices.23 Supernatural beings, communities of faith, and non-secular beliefs, it argued, were not necessary parts of religion.24 During a similar period, psychiatry embraced a biomedical model of mental illness that sought clear separa- tion between normal and abnormal mental behaviors.25 Mental processes associated with both religion and mental illness proved a stumbling block for the new approach, which the field has come to acknowledge but made little progress toward resolving. Part IV discuses the expansion of the definition of insanity, first to include actions that were the result of irresistible impulses and then to embrace acts merely caused by mental disease or defects. During the period of expansion, defense lawyers mothballed deific decree defenses in favor of newer alternatives. But the expansion of the definition of insanity and the dormancy of deific decree rapidly unwound in response to public outrage over the Hinckley verdict.26 Part V analyzes the post-1983 reemergence of the deific decree. Where Christian psychiatrists and judges once found in the doctrine a means of vindicating Christianity, culpability, and the professionaliza- tion and institutionalization of psychiatry, deific decrees today seem increasingly anachronistic. Psychiatry long ago established its primacy in mental health matters, abandoned claims to authority based on Chris- tian credentials, and ceased portraying mental illness as divine punish- ment for sin. The field stands to gain little from its practitioners’ testimony in deific decree cases. Given the difficulties modern psychia- try has distinguishing mental illness from religious belief, such cases may even undermine the field. The doctrine also offers few guarantees that culpable acts will be punished. As the Hinckley backlash demon- strated, the public does not perceive civil commitment to be a substitute for punishment, a view reflected in doctrine in the increasingly formal civil and criminal distinction.27 Few jurists today believe that madness is retribution for sin. Where the deific decree doctrine once affirmed the official and scientific belief that Christian law was supreme over secular law, its emphasis on the commands of a Judeo-Christian God today runs 23. See Welsh v. United States, 398 U.S. 333, 339 (1970) (stating that “sincere and meaningful beliefs . . . need not be confined in either source or content to traditional or parochial concepts of religion”). 24. See Rogers, 48 Mass. (7 Met.) at 495–96 & n.11. 25. See infra Part III.B. 26. See Denno, supra note 18, at 13; Callahan et al., supra note 18, at 55. R 27. See infra notes 205–06 and accompanying text. R \\jciprod01\productn\M\MIA\69-3\MIA310.txt unknown Seq: 7 2-SEP-15 14:09 2015] WHEN GOD DEMANDS BLOOD 761 counter to understandings in both law and psychiatry of the nature of religion. Worse yet, its scope appears to be vanishingly small. Where it once reflected a scientific and official acceptance of an autonomous realm for Christianity distinct from culpability and mental illness, that belief is now absent from both discourses. Cases reveal disappearance of deific decrees in practice, as courts attribute defendants’ claims to hear divine instructions as symptomatic of either ongoing mental illness or provoca- tion.28 To the extent that it continues to have force, it does so by shining a harsh light on the modern insanity standard. Most defendants who assert a deific decree defense are either abusive men who kill their girl- friends and wives and then claim to be acting on orders from God or women suffering severe postpartum depression that causes delusions of divine instructions to kill their children.29 At the expense of throwing a lifeline to abusers, deific decree offers a small number of women who kill as a result of postpartum depression a defense while denying reprieves to the greater share whose mental illness manifest in ways other than delusions of orders from God.30 This article concludes that deific decree doctrine has outlived its usefulness. A somewhat more generous insanity defense would reduce the inequities and irrationalities that deific decrees involve without appreciably loosening standards for criminal culpability. II. EARLY CASES: 1843–1915 There is a well-established history of exonerating or imposing a milder punishment for people who are considered “insane.”31 Pro- nouncements about the problem of punishing mentally impaired crimi- nal defendants are longstanding.32 Plato wrote that insane murderers should endure one year of exile instead of the death penalty that other murderers should face.33 During the Middle Ages, the insane were “rou- tinely exonerated,” a practice that continued in English common law.34 Sir Edward Coke wrote that “the act and wrong of a mad man shall not be imputed to him . . . .”35 Blackstone agreed: “idiots and lunatics are 28. See infra Part V.A. 29. See infra Part V.C. 30. Id. 31. See Susan D. Rozelle, Fear and Loathing in Insanity Law: Explaining the Otherwise Inexplicable Clark v. Arizona, 58 CASE W. RES. L. REV. 19, 23 (2007) (citing PLATO, THE LAWS OF PLATO 258, §§864d–e (Thomas L. Pangle trans., 1980)). 32. See id. 33. See id. 34. DANIEL N. ROBINSON, WILD BEASTS & IDLE HUMOURS: THE INSANITY DEFENSE FROM ANTIQUITYTOTHE PRESENT 71 (Harvard Univ. Press 1996). 35. Brief of the Treatment Advocacy Center as Amicus Curiae in Support of Neither Party at \\jciprod01\productn\M\MIA\69-3\MIA310.txt unknown Seq: 8 2-SEP-15 14:09 762 UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW [Vol. 69:755 not chargeable for their own acts. . . .”36 The key question was determining who was insane. Deific com- mand was entangled with this issue for centuries in Anglo-American law. Judge Tracy formally recognized what became known as the “wild beast” test for insanity in Rex v. Arnold in 1724: [T]he jury . . . should acquit by reason of insanity if it found the defendant to be a madman which he described as “a man that is totally deprived of his understanding and memory, and doth not know what he is doing, no more than an infant, than a brute, or a wild beast, such a one is never the object of punishment.”37 The “wild beast” test set the standard for English criminal law throughout the eighteenth century.38 The English case Rex v. Arnold also noted the possibility of a “visitation by God” in the jury instructions: If he was under the visitation of God, and could not distinguish between good and evil, and did not know what he did, though he committed the greatest offence, yet he could not be guilty of any offence against any law whatsoever; for guilt arises from the mind, and the wicked will and intention of the man.39 In this context, “under the visitation of God” was used as a term for delusional behavior. In 1800, James Hadfield, believing that he was acting on God’s orders, attempted to assassinate King George III.40 Hadfield received a jury acquittal based on the fact that he was “under the influence of insanity at the time the act was committed.”41 Thus, Hadfield represented a departure from the wild beast test in two ways. First, “it rejected the argument that the defendant must be totally deprived of all mental faculty before acquitt[al].” Second, it was the first time that a verdict of not guilty by reasons of insanity (NGBI) “became a separate verdict of acquittal.”42 6 n.5, Clark v. Arizona, 126 S. Ct. 2709 (2006) (No. 05-5966) (citing EDWARD COKE, THE FIRST PARTOFTHE INSTITUTESOFTHE LAWESOF ENGLAND; ORA COMMENTARIEUPON LITTLETON, NOT THE NAMEOFA LAWYER ONELY, BUTOFTHE LAW IT SELFE 247b (2d ed. 1629)). 36. 4 WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND 345–46, §24 (1893). 37. Henry Fradella, From Insanity to Beyond Diminished Capacity: Mental Illness and Criminal Excuse in the Post-Clark Era, 18 U. FLA. J.L. & PUB. POL’Y 7, 14 (2007) (citation omitted). 38. See id. 39. Rex v. Arnold (1724) (Ct. Com. Pl.) (Eng.), reprinted in 16 T.B. HOWELL, A COMPLETE COLLECTION OF STATE TRIALS AND PROCEEDINGS FOR HIGH TREASON AND OTHER CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORSFROMTHE EARLIEST PERIODTOTHE YEAR 1783, at 695, 764 (1816). 40. See Richard Moran, The Origin of Insanity as a Special Verdict: The Trial for Treason of James Hadfield (1800), 19 L. & SOC’Y REV. 487, 492 (1985). 41. See id. at 508. 42. Fradella, supra note 37, at 15. R \\jciprod01\productn\M\MIA\69-3\MIA310.txt unknown Seq: 9 2-SEP-15 14:09 2015] WHEN GOD DEMANDS BLOOD 763 English criminal law went back to the stricter wild beast standard a few years after Hadfield, until M’Naghten was decided in 1843.43 The deific decree defense appears for the first time in American jurisprudence in 1844.44 Commonwealth v. Rogers is a notable case in American law not only for the first appearance of deific decree, but also for importing the M’Naghten “right-wrong” test—the current prevailing test of insanity—from England.45 M’Naghten, a case decided a year before Rogers, held that the test for insanity was “whether the accused at the time of doing the act knew the difference between right and wrong.”46 The doctrine reflects a fundamental principle of criminal law: because people have the ability and free will to choose socially accept- able behavior, the state can hold people responsible and punish those who engage in socially unacceptable behavior that violates the law.47 For people who are unable to make this choice, the state does not clas- sify them as blameworthy or punishable.48 Thus, the insanity defense “separates the ‘bad’ . . . from the ‘mad’ . . . .”49 M’Naghten uses a cognitive standard as a dividing line between madness and badness.50 That is, the individual must suffer from a “disease of the mind” that overwhelms her ability to know socially acceptable behavior or emo- tional impetuosity.51 M’Naghten also requires total impairment, as reflected in the Rogers requirement of a “[full] belief”; people who are 43. See id. at 15 (“[W]ithin a few years of the Hadfield decision, English jurisprudence reverted to using Justice Tracy’s wild beast test, which did require a near complete deprivation of mental faculties for an acquittal.”). 44. See Commonwealth v. Rogers, 48 Mass. (7 Met.) 500, 503 (1844). The theme had appeared in American literature prior to its discussion in the law. For example, in Wieland, or the Transformation, An American Tale, by B. C. Brown, Wieland, the central character, is ordered by God to kill his wife and child. See Christopher Hawthorne, “Deific Decree”: The Short, Happy Life of a Pseudo-Doctrine, 33 LOY. L.A. L. REV. 1755, 1809 n.341 (2000) (citing B. C. BROWN, WIELAND, ORTHE TRANSFORMATION, AN AMERICAN TALE (1811)). 45. See Rogers, 48 Mass. (7 Met.) at 503; Daniel M’Naghten’s Case, (1843) 8 Eng. Rep. 718 (H.L.) 722. 46. See M’Naghten’s Case, (1843) 8 Eng. Rep. at 722. Daniel M’Naghten was charged with murder for attempting to kill the Tory prime minister and killing his secretary instead. See RICHARD MORAN, KNOWING RIGHT FROM WRONG: THE INSANITY DEFENSE OF DANIEL MCNAUGHTAN 5 (1981). M’Naghten insisted, unsuccessfully, that the Tories were persecuting him. See id. Though the courts and most commentators have treated Daniel M’Naghten’s assertions of persecution as mental illness, Richard Moran has made a compelling argument that M’Naghten was in fact correct that the Tories were persecuting him and that the trial should be seen in a political, and not an exclusively psychiatric, light. See id. 47. See Grant H. Morris & Ansar Haroun, “God Told Me to Kill”: Religion or Delusion?, 38 SAN DIEGO L. REV. 973, 997 (2001). 48. See id. 49. See id. at 998. 50. See M’Naghten’s Case, (1843) 8 Eng. Rep. at 719. 51. See id.