Studies of criminal responsibility and limited responsibility / by Charles Follen Folsom.

  • Folsom, Charles Follen, 1842-1907.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of criminal responsibility and limited responsibility / by Charles Follen Folsom. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    acknowledged, that patients with delusional insanity do sometimes commit acts of violence from the same motives which actuate ordinary criminals, and with sufficient power of self-control to have restrained them. I know, however, of only one case where ex¬ perts have held this opinion in court. Nevertheless, it is almost without exception beyond the power of human insight to say in what cases they act in virtue of their insanity and in what they do not; and there¬ fore, once granted that any insane individual has definite delusions, I think that there must be very few physicians who have seen much of the disease, who would under any circumstances hold him fully re¬ sponsible for a crime which he may have committed. The idea that Pomeroy may be suffering from delu¬ sional insanity has now been quite generally aban¬ doned. No delusions have been found, and a person of his limited intelligence could not have concealed them had they existed. The case of Blampied was one of this kind. He was discharged, as recovered, from an insane asylum upon the certificates of four experts, of whom three were officers of the asylum, and the fourth was in practice in the town where Blampied lived. At his trial for a murder which he committed some years after leaving the asylum, and apparently from ordinary motives, no expert testimony was called.