The result is a rather paradoxical situation:  The attitude of the ordinary jury in a homicide case, where the defence of insanity is interposed, is usually at the outset one of distrust, and their impulse is to brush the claim aside.  This tendency is strengthened by the legal presumption, which the prosecutor invariably calls to their attention, that the defendant is sane.  Every expert who has testified for the defence in the ordinary “knock down and drag out” homicide case must have felt with the prisoner’s attorneys, that it was “up to them” not so much to create a doubt of the defendant’s sanity as to prove that he was insane, if they expected consideration from the jury.

Now let us assume that the defence is meritorious and that the prisoner’s experts have created a favorable impression.  Let us go even further and assume that they have generated a reasonable doubt in the mind of the jury as to the defendant’s responsibility at the time he committed the offence.  What generally occurs?  Not, as one would suppose, an acquittal, but, in nine cases out of ten, a conviction in a lower degree.

The only usual result of an honest claim of irresponsibility on the ground of insanity is to lead the jury to reduce the grade of the offence from murder in the first, entailing the death penalty, to murder in the second degree.  The jury have no intention of “taking the chance” involved in turning the man loose on the community and their minds are filled with the predominating fact that a human being has been killed.  They have an idea that it is as easy to get “sworn out” of a lunatic asylum as they suppose it is to get “sworn into” one, and they know that if the prisoner is found to be insane when sent to State’s prison he will be transferred elsewhere.  They, therefore, as a rule, waste little time upon the question of how far the defendant was irresponsible within the legal definition when he committed the deed, but convict him “on general principles,” trusting the prison officials to remedy any possible injustice.  The jury in such cases ignore the law and decline either to acquit or to convict in accordance with the test.  Their action becomes rather that of a lay commission condemning the prisoner to hard labor for life on the ground that he is medically insane.

Assuming that the jury take the defence seriously, there is only one class of cases where, in the writer’s opinion, they follow the legal test as laid down by the court—­that is to say, in cases of extreme brutality.  Here they hold the prisoner to the letter of the law, and the more abhorrent the crime (even where its nature might indicate to a physician that the accused was the victim of some sort of mania) the less likely they are to acquit.  The writer has prosecuted perhaps a dozen homicide and other cases where the defence was insanity.  In his own experience he has known of no acquittal.  In several instances the defendants were undoubtedly