. 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 insane, but, strictly speaking, probably
vaguely knew the nature and quality of their acts and that they were
wrong. In a few of these the juries convicted of murder in the first
degree because the circumstances surrounding the homicides were so
brutal that the harshness of the technical doctrine they were required
to apply was overshadowed in their minds by their horror of the act
itself. In other cases, where either the accused appeared obviously
abnormal as he sat at the bar of justice,