Under the Indian Penal Code, there are certain general defences mentioned in Chapter IV. The purpose of this general defence is to save the accused from conviction if he falls under one of the said general defences. Insanity is on such defence and has been described under section 84 of the Indian Penal Code.
Section 84 of the Indian Penal Code defines unsoundness of mind as the situation where the person does not know either a) the nature of the act he is committing i.e. the person does not know what he is doing or, b) or due to his insanity does not know that the act he is doing is either wrong or contrary to law. The important thing to know is that both of these conditions should be a result of unsoundness of mind.
Unsoundness is seen from two perspectives and includes medical and legal insanity. Medical insanity includes any mental abnormality which impairs any faculty, namely will, emotions or cognition. It is a very wide definition. This definition is more concerned with the mind and not with the brain.
Legal insanity, on the other hand, is only concerned with those disorders of mind which affect the cognitive function of the mind. Unsoundness under section 84 is more a legal question. Currently, the Mc Naghten Rule[1] is standard which is used for defining mental unsoundness. This test is also known as the Right and the Wrong test is one of the most authoritative tests to determine legal unsoundness of mind in a person. Under this test, it is presumed that every person possesses the necessary mental capacity to commit a crime and this assumption can be rebutted by proving the following
- At the time of wrongful act his mental state: Under this head, the important factor is that the incapacity should be at the time of the crime
- Because of some defect of reason: the crime should be committed out of unsoundness of mind
- This defect arose because of disease of the mind: the unsoundness of mind should be caused by some impairment of cognitive facilities such that the accused did not know
- Neither the nature or quality of his act, or
- What was right or wrong
The Indian Penal Code one step further and also included that the person doesn’t know the act is contrary to law. This was done to ensure that defence should not be limited to those acts which were “morally” wrong but legally wrong as well.
Apart from this, there is another test as well which try to understand the complex nature of the human mind and determine insanity if present. The author has mentioned the other tests in brief in the following few paragraphs.
Wild beast test: This test was identified in the case of Arnold in 1724. Under this, the standard was considered to be that the accused was totally bereft of understanding and as a result, he behaved like a child or a brutish beast. This was a very high standard since it involved complete deprivation of any sort of understanding.[2]
Delusion Test: According to this test, the people who due to their delusions could not form the correct reasoning for their acts were considered to be legally insane.
Irresistible Impulse test: Under this test, the person must suffer from such severe impulse so as to override all the reasons and judgement of the person and thereby obliterating all sense of right and wrong and deprive the person of power to choose.[3]
Now that we have looked at some of the major tests to determine legal insanity, we will see some of the major Indian Case laws.
In the case of Queen vs. Lakshman Dagdu, ILR 1886 10 Bombay; the father had a fever for the last few days as a result of which he became extremely sensitive. One night the father, who had a small child, killed it because the child was making excessive noise. When the mother came back, she found the child killed and her husband sleeping in the bed. In this case, the defendant claimed sudden and irresistible impulse, the court held that any impulse which causes only a temporary intellectual aberration and not some long-term impacts does not qualify as defence.
In the case of State of MP vs. Ahmadullah[4], the son-in-law enters the mother-in-law’s room and kills her by severing her head puts it in a cloth bag and hides a torch at another place. The witnesses included a government surgeon, who deposed that the person suffered from fits as a result of epilepsy and another witness was his father, who claimed that he found his son lying on the street the next day. The court held that it cannot be proved that the accused was suffering from the fits at the time of the crime and thus he cannot take the defence of insanity.
In this article, we understood the defence of insanity under criminal law. We analysed the requirements under section 84 of the IPC, along with this we saw the different tests prescribed under various judgements and the case laws pertaining to Insanity as a defence.
[1] https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-criminallaw/chapter/6-1-the-insanity-defense/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5282615/#sec1-5title
[3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/irresistible_impulse_test
[4] State of MP vs. Ahmadullah, 1961 AIR 998.
This Article is Authored by Eashaan Agrawal, BA LLB (Hons) Student at National Law University, Delhi.
Also Read – A Loophole for Criminals: Insanity as a Defense
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