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merican Gothic - the long-faced couple standing sentry before their wooden house in apron and overalls, pitchfork in hand - is the most famous painting in American art. It is instantly recognisable to millions of people from Oregon to Osaka who hardly know its name, still less that of the painter.

In its comparatively short life (it was made in 1930), Grant Wood's masterpiece has become one of those rare paintings that are constantly quoted in spoofs, advertisements, movies and cartoons, so familiar they can be readily invoked in a quick sketch or even just by one detail, such as the arched window. Even if we do not know its title, American Gothic is by now as proverbial as the Mona Lisa, The Starry Night and The Scream, a point not lost on parodists who have Photoshopped Van Gogh's stars into the Iowan skies above that pointed roof, introduced Leonardo's Lisa into the family romance and even married Grant Wood with Edvard Munch. A Gothic Scream flipbook is available - two for the price of one - that morphs the stern midwestern farmer into the Norwegian screecher.

People pose for a selfie and fit right in, like figures in a seaside cutout board: surrogates for the upstanding couple

But is he in fact a farmer, this man from whose powerful hand the pitchfork grows like a tree? It would be an understatement to say that opinions have differed over the years. For this stupendous image - apparently as plain and direct as the small-town Iowans it portrays, apparently as simple as the summer setting - turns out to be uniquely controversial and mysterious. Is it a celebration of these hardworking folk, upright in their moral values, steadfast against the terrible deprivations of the Great Depression, as so many Americans have believed; or is it slyly satirical? Is Wood painting a hymn of praise to his neighbours in Cedar Rapids, or sending up their strict narrow-mindedness? When the painting flies into this country, centrepiece of America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s at the Royal Academy, many British viewers will have their first chance to decide. For American Gothic lives mainly in reproduction, intensely memorable even to those who have never seen it in person. Its staying power is exceptional in every respect, for the painting has never before left the United States.

It is the clarity of the image that strikes first: neat as a pin, well made as the wooden house, pristine as the woman's ironed pinny. Everything fits and everything is in perfect order. Flat, graphic, meticulously detailed, as rigidly frontal as a Renaissance portrait, each part so crisp and distinct, it is no wonder Wood's painting lends itself so well to reproduction (and jigsaw).

Here is an American Eden of blue skies and plump trees, peopled by a pinched Eve and a work-hardened Adam, their labours rewarded by sheer survival, their virtue enshrined in the church-like facade behind them. It appears to be almost a primer of rural life. But some see the man as a hellfire preacher rather than a farmer, his pitchfork the prop for some pitiless sermon; others view him as a small-town clerk, home from work and out in his denims to hay the cows in the barn.

The woman is his supportive wife, stiff as her pioneer husband; or perhaps she is his maiden daughter, whose honour he is defending with that pitchfork ( Robert Hughes's goatish opinion). Perhaps, with her antique brooch and outmoded braid, she really believes in old-fashioned values; or maybe she is about to bolt from this prison, the telltale curl of hair escaping like a sign of the future.

From a Time magazine cover to a backdrop for Walter and Skyler White of TV's Breaking Bad, American Gothic has inspired hundreds of parodies.

They are a sanctimonious pair, probably unforgiving Republicans, straitlaced as their clothes, with no music in their life; or they are the opposite: American heroes, prairie puritans carrying on the spirit of the founding fathers, living the hard life but never giving up - even during the disastrous drought of 1930, when there was practically no hay to pitch.

Every opposing interpretation has spawned a spoof, and even the spoofs have their imitations. American Gothic has become arguably the most parodied painting in history. Lyndon and Lady Bird, Ronald and Nancy, Bill and Hill, Barack and Michelle, Barbie and Ken, Homer and Marge, Kermit and Miss Piggy (the cameo brooch now showing a porker) have all stood in front of that facade, as Donald and Melania surely will if they haven't already. The building is almost as famous as that other White House; the painting cannot resist partisan politics. And every time these spoofs appear, proposing the dour duo as representative Americans of one stripe or another, they communicate the beautiful lucidity of the painting, with its dovetailed composition, and yet the mystery of it too.

About its origins, and the painter, a great deal is known. Grant Wood was born in Anamosa, Iowa, in 1891. He was only 10 when his father died and his mother moved her small family to Cedar Rapids. Here he went to boarding school, laboured for dimes in a metal shop, and eventually managed to get himself into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1913. His early paintings of the rolling Iowan landscape are appealing, if anonymous, but in the 1920s he made four trips to Europe and was stunned by the northern European painters he saw there, particularly in Munich. He admired Dürer, Van Eyck and Hans Memling; his paintings learn from their stark frontality, intense precision and simplicity of form. He was even dubbed the Iowa Memling by the New York art writer Lincoln Kirstein.

Where other painters returned from Europe dreaming of a new avant garde art for the States - urban, jazzy, post-cubist, even abstract, as the Royal Academy exhibition will show - Wood had entirely different ideas. In Paris he told the journalist William Shirer that he was going home "to paint those damn cows and barns and barnyards and cornfields and little red schoolhouses... and the women in their aprons and the men in their overalls and store suits... Isn't that what Sinclair Lewis has done in his writing... Damn it, you can do it in painting too!"

The allusion to Lewis is a signal because his masterpiece, Main Street, indubitably satirises the strict conservatism of small-town life. The novel's heroine, Carol Milford, is desperate to get away, and eventually makes it to Washington (only to return, defeated). But if there is a trace of Carol in the woman's suppressed expression in American Gothic, it is not with human nature, curiously, that the painting began.

Grant Wood is the patron saint of Cedar Rapids, his home and studio a museum, his one-room schoolhouse depicted on the Iowa state quarter. His painting of the carpenter gothic house, with its sharp arches and pitched roof, translating medieval stonework into pine planks, made this quaint style familiar the world over. And this is where the picture has its origins. For although the house tends to dissolve in the mind's eye in comparison to its owners, it was the structure, not the people, that inspired a visual triangle so compelling it brought instant fame to the unknown painter. Wood saw the house in August 1930 while teaching an art class in the Iowa town of Eldon. Struck by the oddity of a small frame house with a large gothic window (the owners are said to have bought it from a Sears and Roebuck catalogue) he stopped to make an oil sketch. Back home, he elongated the window and considered adding some homeowners. "I imagined American gothic people with their faces stretched out long," he said in an interview, "to go with the gothic house." Three months later the painting won a bronze prize at the Art Institute of Chicago, which immediately bought the work. It has hung there, welcoming the crowds, ever since.

People pose for a selfie and inevitably fit right in, like figures inserted in a seaside cutout board: upright surrogates for the upstanding couple. And the secular trinity of the home and its owners is echoed in other verticals all through the painting: the three prongs of the fork rhyme with the bib of the overalls, the stripes of the shirt, the window frames, even the witty cactus on the porch. The sloped roof unites the two heads, the farmer's gold collar stud is repeated in the lightning rod on the roof, the peaks of the rickrack braid imitate the shape of the window in miniature. Even the pattern of the apron repeats the dotted blind in that famous window - a window that Wood confessed he found privately absurd.

The artist's models, Nan Wood Graham - his sister - and Byron McKeeby - his dentist - pose next to the painting.

Was he sincere? Was he having it both ways? Certainly Wood was not portraying real citizens of Eldon in their local surroundings: the whole scene is made up. The woman is his sister Nan, then aged 31; the man is his dentist, Dr Byron McKeeby, who treated the painter for gum disease. Wood dressed them like "tintypes from my old family album", sending away for "a prim, colonial print" apron and overalls from a mail order firm in Chicago. Nan later recalled that her brother asked for "a trim that was out of style. I ripped some off mother's old dresses, and after the painting made its debut, rickrack made a comeback." What was to become the quintessential image of America's rural heartland was a kind of history painting, therefore, and a fabrication from the start.

The two models never posed together for the painting, only for a photograph taken alongside it in 1942. This shot shows the dentist in a natty tweed suit and Nan with a stylish Marcel wave; it also reveals Wood's exceptional gift for a likeness. Compare his self-portrait, watchful behind little gold-rimmed spectacles, the same tight group of features centred in the long oval face, with his sister's portrait in American Gothic and you see the true family resemblance. Keeper of her brother's flame long after his premature death from cancer at the age of 51, Nan Wood Graham sued when Playboy inevitably got in on the spoofing in the late 1960s, showing the couple without their shirts.

But by then the parodies were in full flow. As far back as 1941, a photographer had posed a black couple in front of Wood's painting to emphasise its "white values". And in 1957, in Meredith Willson's droll musical The Music Man, the main character lands up in a pseudo-Eldon where he encounters laconically chippy Iowans, among them the characters from American Gothic, already so popular as to raise a smile, stepping straight from the picture frame. In the first number, the Iowans sing of their terrible stubbornness: "We can stand touchin' noses for a week at a time, and never see eye to eye."

If you search online for parodies, there are hundreds of results. Some of the satires are purely political - Obama skewering Hillary on his pitchfork in the 2008 primaries; Hillary wearing the trousers; or trying too hard to be folksy in the 2015 campaign. Sometimes they're about gender - two women, commemorating Iowa's first gay marriage - or about race: Mexican Gothic, and so on. Hollywood ghouls play the gothic roles; the man becomes a Klansman; the woman is Lynndie England with a yardful of Abu Ghraib bodies.

Dressed in 80s clothes, the couple appear on the cover of Family Weekly, illustrating the feature "Why Marriages Fail". For Time magazine, now accessorised with inline skates, mobile phones and tattoos, they are the tediously conventional look of cool. The fork becomes cutlery, emblem of obese America. The couple are in gas masks protesting against pollution. The house is up for sale - repeatedly - after the 2008 crash.

'Neat as a pin': the American Gothic house in Eldon, Iowa, made famous by Grant Wood.
Photograph: Joel Sartore/Getty Images/National Geographic

They are all-Americans, raised to a happier life in ads for ribs, beer and Paul Newman's organic cookies; or they are poor Americans, plagued by healthcare, big pharma and graft. Sometimes the painting is construed simply as an American icon, like Liberty or the flag; sometimes it is a jab at cookie-cutter lives and the gun lobby.

Endless variations reflect endless interpretations. When she first saw it, Gertrude Stein wrote "We should fear Grant Wood. Every artist and every school of artists should be afraid of him, for his devastating satire." And an Iowan farm wife, seeing the picture in the papers in 1930, telephoned Wood to express popular local opinion. According to the artist, she wished "to come over and smash my head" for depicting her countrymen as grim Bible-thumpers. Wood protested that this was not a caricature but the proof of his appreciation. "I had to go to France," he said, "to appreciate Iowa."

But Wood himself exacerbates the controversy. He played to the painting, dressing in rugged overalls ever after and telling the press "All the good ideas I've ever had came to me while I was milking a cow." Yet he was no farmer, was apparently repelled by livestock and his statements about the picture were bafflingly contradictory. "There is satire in it," he said, "but only as there is satire in any realistic statement" - a confusing, if not meaningless remark. Later, Wood countered that he "did not intend this painting as satire. It seems to me that they are basically solid and good people. But I don't feel that one gets at this fact better by denying their faults."

Sarah Oehler, Chicago curator of America After the Fall, believes the mystery of the painting "lies in the blank expressions. The figures are expressionless, and that opens the door to one's personal connection to the painting and, more importantly, projection on to it." But is the woman with the faraway eyes really so expressionless? And what about the way she is painted? Many people have seen dalliance in that loose curl, and perhaps in the woman's gaze wandering out of this scene.

The picture shows a way of life fading away even as Wood painted it

For although the composition is as frontal as a religious icon, a vision of rectitude underpinned by geometry, the symmetry is subtly askew. The woman stands just behind, rather than alongside the man, turning her head away. Wood said he wanted her to appear just as self-righteous as the man, but surely the painting goes against this. She is detached from him, has other views in mind, an inner life of her own.

The magnitude of response to American Gothic shows how profoundly it speaks to Americans, yet what does it say? When it appears at the Royal Academy alongside other 1930s regionalist paintings praising the soil of the land, its meaning may be clearer. If Wood seemed practically a city slicker to some backwood Iowans, he was catnip to urban citizens, who saw in his rolling hills and sweeping cornfields, his idolisations of farm workers in solo paintings and the starring part he gave to the gothic couple - poor people taking the place of the aristocrats in Renaissance art - an answer to the Great Depression. Not for nothing, one feels, is the painting signed and dated on the denim overalls - signifying the labour that made America great.

Some of Wood's painter friends thought his adoption of overalls more of a guise than a gimmick, however - a way of covering up his possible homosexuality. Adrian Locke, the show's London curator, believes that Wood was making a new art where ordinary folk like his neighbours took centre stage, and that he was both fond of and terribly constrained by them. "As a gay man unable to live the life he wanted because of the repressive moral values of the day, he must have been suffocated by this environment. If these are the moral guardians, he seems to be asking, then have we placed our trust in the right people? Are they the face of the future or that of the past?"

Self-portrait, 1932, resembles Wood's sister: 'the same tight group of features centred in the long oval face'. Photograph: City of Davenport Art Collection

The picture shows a way of life fading away even as Wood painted it, for many rural Iowans were already leaving for the city by 1930. Yet it touched people so deeply that canny newspapers kept printing reproductions that readers could tack to the wall through the 30s; and rickrack braid made its comeback. For the image represents a common shared history, a rock-solid past upon which the present is still and forever based, a toughness and probity that builds houses like this, that protects the land, that keeps America upright. The couple may be Democrats, advocates of social and economic equality, ready to open that barn to the whole farming community. Or they may be Trumpers, refusing to be ignored any more, determined to see the Washington elite overturned. But they still live in the same land of the free. A church spire rises in the distance beyond the green trees. God Bless America!

That spire is of course part of Wood's emblematic design. Shape is everything in his composition. The long narrow faces make a quartet with the long narrow windows. Indeed, the whole painting is constructed as neatly as the house itself - people bonded with home. He has carpentered his work flawlessly, has the aptly named Wood; the picture is even painted on beaverwood.

As for Stein's suggestion of devastating satire, consult another painting altogether.Daughters of the Revolution shows a trio of "Tory gals", as Wood called them, long-necked, deeply complacent old dames raising a dainty cup to the spirit of 1776. Behind them, by mordant contrast, is Emanuel Leutze's deathless painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware. Was it for this that his soldiers died?

American Gothic holds its own; it can admit every kind of interpretation because its structure is so sound. And it contains two of America's greatest portraits in the faces of McKeeby and Nan, from his beetle brows and sunken cheeks with their vertical grooves to her prematurely etched frown. They appear extraordinarily particular, not to say familiar - you can summon them to mind as readily as the Mona Lisa - and yet they also represent the common people, are both themselves, yet recognisable types. That is the exceptional balancing act the artist achieves. You would know them anywhere, and yet these folks are like all of us - outwardly open, infinitely complex inside. Wood transformed these anonymous locals into American archetypes in what was always designed to be a Daughters of the Revolution painting or, in today's parlance, an icon.
America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s is at the Royal Academy, London, 25 February-4 June

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American Gothic: a state visit to Britain for the first couple

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merican Gothic - the long-faced couple standing sentry before their wooden house in apron and overalls, pitchfork in hand - is the most famous painting in American art. It is instantly recognisable to millions of people from Oregon to Osaka who hardly know its name, still less that of the painter.

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Gothic and madness - some articles and thoughts about crime and madness

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Gothic and madness - some articles and thoughts about crime and madness

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Digimindmap permet de créer des cartes heuristiques simples

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Madness And Obsession In Tell-Tale Heart | ipl.org

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In the, Tell-tale Heart, Poe’s central ideas of madness and obsession are supported by his use of point-of-view, repetition, and punctuation. Poe’s use of a…

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Life of Edgar Poe Was Dark And Dramatic (As Well As the End of His Life)

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Article about madness and guilt in the Tell tale heart 

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Article about madness and guilt in the Tell tale heart 

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Think about importance at this time of a definition of madness for crime...

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Daniel M'Naghten c. 1856

The M'Naghten rule(s) (pronounced, and sometimes spelled, McNaughton) is a legal test defining the defence of insanity that was formulated by the House of Lords in 1843. It is the established standard in UK criminal law. Versions have been adopted in some US states, currently or formerly, and other jurisdictions, either as case law or by statute. Its original wording is a proposed jury instruction:

that every man is to be presumed to be sane, and... that to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.

The rule was created in reaction to the acquittal in 1843 of Daniel M'Naghten on the charge of murdering Edward Drummond. M'Naghten had shot Drummond after mistakenly identifying him as the British Prime Minister Robert Peel, who was the intended target. The acquittal of M'Naghten on the basis of insanity, a hitherto unheard-of defence per se in modern form, caused a public uproar, with protests from the establishment and the press, even prompting Queen Victoria to write to Robert Peel calling for a "wider interpretation of the verdict". The House of Lords, using a medieval right to question judges, asked a panel of judges presided over by Sir Nicolas Conyngham Tindal, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, a series of hypothetical questions about the defence of insanity. The principles expounded by this panel have come to be known as the "M'Naghten Rules". M'Naghten himself would have been found guilty if they had been applied at his trial.

The rules so formulated as M'Naghten's Case 1843 10 C & F 200, or variations of them, are a standard test for criminal liability in relation to mentally disordered defendants in various jurisdictions, either in common law or enacted by statute. When the tests set out by the rules are satisfied, the accused may be adjudged "not guilty by reason of insanity" or "guilty but insane" and the sentence may be a mandatory or discretionary, but usually indeterminate, period of treatment in a secure hospital facility, or otherwise at the discretion of the court, depending on the country and the offence charged, instead of a punitive disposal.

A portrait of Daniel M'Naughten. Illustration for The Illustrated London News, 4 February 1843

There are various justifications for the exemption of the insane from criminal responsibility. When mental incapacity is successfully raised as a defence in a criminal trial it absolves a defendant from liability: it applies public policies in relation to criminal responsibility by applying a rationale of compassion, accepting that it is morally wrong to punish a person if that person is deprived permanently or temporarily of the capacity to form a necessary mental intent that the definition of a crime requires. Punishment of the obviously mentally ill by the state may undermine public confidence in the penal system. A utilitarian and humanitarian approach suggests that the interests of society are better served by treatment.

Historically, insanity was seen as grounds for leniency. In pre-Norman times in England there was no distinct criminal code - a murderer could pay compensation to the victim's family under the principle of "buy off the spear or bear it". The insane person's family were expected to pay any compensation for the crime. In Norman times, insanity was not seen as a defence in itself, but a special circumstance in which the jury would deliver a guilty verdict and refer the defendant to the King for a pardon

since they are without sense and reason and can no more commit a tort or a felony than a brute animal, since they are not far removed from brutes, as is evident in the case of a minor, for if he should kill another while under age he would not suffer judgment.

In R v Arnold 1724 16 How St. Tr. 765, the test for insanity was expressed in the following terms

whether the accused is totally deprived of his understanding and memory and knew what he was doing "no more than a wild beast or a brute, or an infant".

The next major advance occurred in Hadfield's Trial 1800 27 How St. Tr. 765, in which the court decided that a crime committed under some delusion would be excused, only if it would have been excusable had the delusion been true. This would deal with the situation, for example, when the accused imagines he is cutting through a loaf of bread, whereas in fact he is cutting through a person's neck.

Each jurisdiction may have its own standards of the insanity defence. More than one standard can be applied to any case based on multiple jurisdictions.

M'Naghten rules

The House of Lords delivered the following exposition of the rules:

the jurors ought to be told in all cases that every man is to be presumed to be sane, and to possess a sufficient degree of reason to be responsible for his crimes, until the contrary be proved to their satisfaction; and that to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.

The central issue of this definition may be stated as, "Did the defendant know what he was doing, or, if so, that it was wrong?", and the issues raised have been analysed in subsequent appellate decisions.

Sanity is a rebuttable presumption and the burden of proof is on the party denying it; the standard of proof is on a balance of probabilities, that is to say that mental incapacity is more likely than not. If this burden is successfully discharged, the party relying upon it is entitled to succeed. In Lord Denning's judgement in Bratty v Attorney-General for Northern Ireland 1963 AC 386, whenever the defendant makes an issue of his state of mind, the prosecution can adduce evidence of insanity. However, this will normally only arise to negate the defence case when automatism or diminished responsibility is in issue.

In practical terms, the defence will be more likely to raise the issue of mental incapacity to negate or minimise criminal liability. In R v Clarke 1972 1 All E R 219 a defendant charged with a shoplifting claimed she had no because she had absent-mindedly walked out of the shop without paying because she suffered from depression. When the prosecution attempted to adduce evidence that this constituted insanity within the Rules, she changed her plea to guilty, but on appeal the Court ruled that she had been merely denying mens rea rather than raising a defence under the Rules and her conviction was quashed. The general rule was stated that the Rules apply only to cases in which the defect of reason is substantial.

Whether a particular condition amounts to a disease of the mind within the Rules is not a medical but a legal question to be decided in accordance with the ordinary rules of interpretation. It seems that any disease which produces a malfunctioning of the mind is a disease of the mind and need not be a disease of the brain itself. The term has been held to cover numerous conditions:

In R v Kemp [1957] 1 QB 399 arteriosclerosis or a hardening of the arteries caused loss of control during which the defendant attacked his wife with a hammer. This was an internal condition and a disease of the mind.

In R v Sullivan [1984] AC 156 during an epileptic episode, the defendant caused grievous bodily harm: epilepsy was an internal condition and a disease of the mind, and the fact that the state was transitory was irrelevant.

In R v Quick; R v Paddison [1973] QB 910 the defendant committed an assault while in a state of hypoglycaemia caused by the insulin he had taken, the alcohol he had consumed and not eating properly. It was ruled that the judge should have left the defence of automatism open to him, so his conviction was quashed (he had pleaded guilty rather than not guilty by reason of insanity). This was where the internal/external divide doctrine was first expressed, probably due to judicial reluctance to hospitalise someone for a condition that could be cured by a sugar lump. It is doubtful that a jury would have accepted a defence of automatism, but nonetheless the issue should have been left to them.

In R v Hennessy [1989] 1 WLR 287 a diabetic stole a car and drove it while suffering from a mild attack of hyperglycaemia caused by stress and a failure to take his insulin. Lane LCJ said at 294

In our judgment, stress, anxiety and depression can no doubt be the result of the operation of external factors, but they are not, it seems to us, in themselves separately or together external factors of the kind capable in law of causing or contributing to a state of automatism. They constitute a state of mind which is prone to recur. They lack the feature of novelty or accident, which is the basis of the distinction drawn by Lord Diplock in R v Sullivan 1984 AC 156, 172. It is contrary to the observations of Devlin J., to which we have just referred in Hill v Baxter (1958) 1 QB 277, 285. It does not, in our judgment, come within the scope of the exception of some external physical factor such as a blow on the head or the administration of an anaesthetic.

In Bratty v Attorney-General for Northern Ireland [1963] AC 386 Lord Denning observed that a crime committed while sleepwalking would appear to him to be one committed as an automaton. However, the ruling in R v Sullivan that diseases of the mind need have no permanence led many academics to suggest that sleepwalkers might well be found to be suffering from a disease of the mind with internal causes unless there was clear evidence of an external causal factor.

In R v Burgess [1991] 2 QB 92 the Court of Appeal ruled that the defendant, who wounded a woman by hitting her with a video recorder while sleepwalking, was insane under the M'Naghten Rules. Lord Lane said, "We accept that sleep is a normal condition, but the evidence in the instant case indicates that sleepwalking, and particularly violence in sleep, is not normal."

The courts have clearly drawn a distinction between internal and external factors affecting a defendant's mental condition. This is partly based on risk of recurrence, whereby the High Court of Australia has expressed that the defence of automatism is unable to be considered when the mental disorder has been proved transient and as such not likely to recur. However, the distinction between insanity and automatism is difficult because the distinction between internal and external divide is difficult.

Many diseases consist of a predisposition, considered an internal cause, combined with a precipitant, which would be considered an external cause. Actions committed while sleepwalking would normally be considered as "non-insane automatism", but often alcohol and stress trigger bouts of sleepwalking and make them more likely to be violent. The diabetic who takes insulin but does not eat properly - is that an internal or external cause?

This phrase refers to the physical nature and quality of the act, rather than the moral quality. It covers the situation where the defendant does not know what he is physically doing. Two common examples used are:

The defendant cuts a woman's throat under the delusion that he is cutting a loaf of bread,

The defendant chops off a sleeping man's head because he has the deluded idea that it would be great fun to see the man looking for it when he wakes up.

The judges were specifically asked if a person could be excused if he committed an offence in consequence of an insane delusion. They replied that if he labours under such partial delusion only, and is not in other respects insane, "he must be considered in the same situation as to responsibility as if the facts with respect to which the delusion exists were real". This rule requires the court to take the facts as the accused believed them to be and follows Hadfield's Trial, above. If the delusions do not prevent the defendant from having mens rea there will be no defence.

In R v Bell 1984 Crim. LR 685, the defendant smashed a van through the entrance gates of a holiday camp because "It was like a secret society in there, I wanted to do my bit against it" as instructed by God. It was held that, as the defendant had been aware of his actions, he could neither have been in a state of automatism nor insane, and the fact that he believed that God had told him to do this merely provided an explanation of his motive and did not prevent him from knowing that what he was doing was wrong in the legal sense.

The interpretation of this clause is a subject of controversy among legal authorities, and different standards may apply in different jurisdictions.

"Wrong" was interpreted to mean legally wrong, rather than morally wrong, in the case of Windle 1952 2QB 826; 1952 2 All ER 1 246, where the defendant killed his wife with an overdose of aspirin; he telephoned the police and said, "I suppose they will hang me for this." It was held that this was sufficient to show that although the defendant was suffering from a mental illness, he was aware that his act was wrong, and the defence was not allowed.

Under this interpretation, there may be cases where the mentally ill know that their conduct is legally prohibited, but it is arguable that their mental condition prevents them making the connection between an act being legally prohibited and the societal requirement to conform their conduct to the requirements of the criminal law.

As an example of a contrasting interpretation in which defendant lacking knowledge that the act was morally wrong meets the M'Naghten standards, there are the instructions the judge is required to provide to the jury in cases in New York State when the defendant has raised an insanity plea as a defence:

... with respect to the term "wrong", a person lacks substantial capacity to know or appreciate that conduct is wrong if that person, as a result of mental disease or defect, lacked substantial capacity to know or appreciate either that the conduct was against the law or that it was against commonly held moral principles, or both.

There is other support in the authorities for this interpretation of the standards enunciated in the findings presented to the House of Lords regarding M'Naghten's case:

If it be accepted, as can hardly be denied, that the answers of the judges to the questions asked by the House of Lords in 1843 are to be read in the light of the then existing case-law and not as novel pronouncements of a legislative character, then the [Australian] High Court's analysis in Stapleton's Case is compelling. Their exhaustive examination of the extensive case-law concerning the defence of insanity prior to and at the time of the trial of M'Naughten establishes convincingly that it was morality and not legality which lay as a concept behind the judges' use of "wrong" in the M'Naghten rules.

In DPP v Harper (1997) it was held that insanity is not generally a defence to strict liability offences. In this instance, the accused was driving with excess alcohol. By definition, the accused is sufficiently aware of the nature of the activity to commit the actus reus of driving and presumably knows that driving while drunk is legally wrong. Any other feature of the accused's knowledge is irrelevant.

Section 1 of the United Kingdoms' Criminal Procedure (Insanity and Unfitness to Plead) Act 1991 provides that a jury shall not return a special verdict that "the accused is not guilty by reason of insanity" except on the written or oral evidence of two or more registered medical practitioners of whom at least one has special experience in the field of mental disorder. This may require the jury to decide between conflicting medical evidence which they are not necessarily equipped to do, but the law goes further and allows them to disagree with the experts if there are facts or surrounding circumstances which, in the opinion of the court, justify the jury in coming to that conclusion.

Under section 5 of the United Kingdom's Criminal Procedure (Insanity) Act 1964 (as amended):

1. Where the sentence for the offence to which the finding relates is fixed by law (e.g. murder), the court must make a hospital order (see section 37 Mental Health Act 1983) with a restriction order limiting discharge and other rights (see section 41 Mental Health Act 1983).

2. In any other case the court may make:

a hospital order (with or without a restriction order);

a supervision order; or

an order for absolute discharge.

There have been four major criticisms of the law as it currently stands:

Medical irrelevance - The legal definition of insanity has not advanced significantly since 1843; in 1953 evidence was given to the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment that doctors even then regarded the legal definition to be obsolete and misleading. This distinction has led to absurdities such as

even though a legal definition suffices, mandatory hospitalisation can be ordered in cases of murder; if the defendant is not medically insane, there is little point in requiring medical treatment.

Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, imported into English law by the Human Rights Act 1998, provides that a person of unsound mind may be detained only where proper account of objective medical expertise has been taken. As yet, no cases have occurred in which this point has been argued.

Ineffectiveness - The rules currently do not distinguish between defendants who represent a public danger and those who do not. Illnesses such as diabetes and epilepsy can be controlled by medication such that sufferers are less likely to have temporary aberrations of mental capacity, but the law does not recognise this.

Sentencing for murder - A finding of insanity may well result in indefinite confinement in a hospital, whereas a conviction for murder may well result in a determinate sentence of between ten and 15 years; faced with this choice, it may be that defendants would prefer the certainty of the latter option. The defence of diminished responsibility in section 2(1) of the Homicide Act would reduce the conviction to voluntary manslaughter with more discretion on the part of the judge in regards to sentencing.

Scope - A practical issue is whether the fact that an accused is labouring under a "mental disability" should be a necessary but not sufficient condition for negating responsibility i.e. whether the test should also require an incapacity to understand what is being done, to know that what one is doing is wrong, or to control an impulse to do something and so demonstrate a causal link between the disability and the potentially criminal acts and omissions. For example, the Irish insanity defence comprises the M'Naghten Rules and a control test that asks whether the accused was debarred from refraining from committing the act because of a defect of reason due to mental illness (see Doyle v Wicklow County Council 1974) 55 IR 71. The Butler Committee recommended that proof of severe mental disorder should be sufficient to negate responsibility, in effect creating an irrebuttable presumption of irresponsibility arising from proof of a severe mental disorder. This has been criticised as it assumes a lack of criminal responsibility simply because there is evidence of some sort of mental dysfunction, rather than establishing a standard of criminal responsibility. According to this view, the law should be geared to culpability not mere psychiatric diagnosis.

The insanity defence article has a number of alternative tests that have been used at different times and places. As one example, the ALI test replaced the M'Naghten rule in many parts of the United States for many years until the 1980s; when, in the aftermath of John Hinckley shooting US President Ronald Reagan, many ALI states returned to a variation of M'Naghten.

The M'Naghten rules are at the focus of John Grisham's legal thriller A Time to Kill. The M'Naghten rules apply in the US State of Mississippi, where the plot is set, and using them is the only way for the lawyer protagonist to save his client.

Notes

Bibliography

Boland, F. (1996). "Insanity, the Irish Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights". 47 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 260.

Bucknill, J. C. (1881). "The Late Lord Chief Justice of England on Lunacy". Brain. 4: 1-26. doi:10.1093/brain/4.1.1.

Butler Committee. (1975). The Butler Committee on Mentally Abnormal Offenders, London: HMSO, Cmnd 6244

Dalby, J.T. (2006). "The Case of Daniel McNaughton: Let's get the story straight". American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry. 27: 17-32.

Ellis, J. W. (1986). "The Consequences of the Insanity Defense: Proposals to reform post-acquittal commitment laws". Catholic University Law Review. 35: 961.

Gostin, L. (1982). "Human Rights, Judicial Review and the Mentally Disordered Offender". (1982) Crim. LR 779.

The Law Reform Commission of Western Australia. The Criminal Process and Persons Suffering from Mental Disorder, Project No. 69, August 1991. [2]

Elliott, Catherine; Quinn, Frances (2000). Criminal Law (Third ed.). Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Ltd. pp. 241-248. ISBN 978-0-582-42352-7.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The M'Naghten rule(s) (pronounced, and sometimes spelled, McNaughton) is a legal test defining the defence of insanity that was formulated by the House of Lords in 1843. It is the established standard in UK criminal law. Versions have been adopted in some US states, currently or formerly, and other jurisdictions, either as case law or by statute.