Failures of the M’Naghten Rules: Women and the Insanity Defence in Victorian England
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the medicolegal insanity defence in criminal trials in Victorian England. It analyzes the test for criminal liability embodied in a set of rules called the M’Naghten rules that followed the trial and acquittal of Daniel M’Naghten in 1843. The paper examines the difficulties in upholding the rules in criminal case law in the middle decades of the 19th century. The research question that will be addressed is: what role did gender play when determining the mental condition of the accused in Victorian society? Moreover, how did gender affect the treatment and the punishment of mentally ill individuals who had been convicted of crimes, and how did the stigma of mental illness shape treatment and punishment? Rather than being labelled as insane, people suffering from mental illnesses were sometimes given the titles "missing," "absent," and "unconscious." What happened to those who did not meet the legal criteria to be tried as mentally insane? Finally, what difficulties did the courts and testifying physicians face while interpreting criminal responsibility? The paper will investigate key legal cases and trial narratives in several Victorian novels to draw conclusions about the cultural history of the insanity defence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".