The Criminal Lunatics Act of 1800 and the Question of Criminal Intent

In England the passage of the Criminal Lunatics Act in 1800 made lunatics 'a formal species' defined in law. It also formalized a procedure for dealing with them and if during a criminal trial a jury found the defendant to be insane, the court could order him to be kept in custody although no verdict had been reached on the criminal charge. This post-1792 English law did not apply in Upper Canada, but it was well known to judges like Robinson. One of its key legal principles was that if the defendant was insane and could not understand his rights within a trial, he was not fit to plead. These rights included challenges to the jury impanelled. The real concern of the law was with the question of intent. In the words of Joel Eigen, 'only intentional behaviour was punishable by law: the perpetrator who failed to understand the wrongfulness of an action could not be said to have acted with criminal intent.'

--David Murray, Colonial Justice: Justice, Morality, and Crime in the Niagara District, 1791-1849, Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History (2002; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 92.