Ah, the courtroom. That hallowed arena where society’s darkest deeds are dressed up in powdered wigs and procedural niceties. Today’s offering from America: Luigi Mangione, a man accused of murder, whose lawyers now plan to plead insanity by invoking a British legal precedent. How delightfully meta. The empire strikes back, it seems, even in the dock.
Let us savour the details. Mangione stands trial for a state murder charge, and his counsel intends to argue that he was not in his right mind. They cite the 1843 case of Daniel M’Naghten, a Scotsman who shot a man he mistook for the Prime Minister. The M’Naghten Rules, born from that affair, became the benchmark for insanity pleas across the common law world: that a defendant must not have known what he was doing, or if he did, he did not know it was wrong. It is a quaint, Victorian construct, forged in an age when madness was a moral failing and asylums were tourist attractions.
But Mangione’s team is not merely reaching for old rope. They are signalling something deeper: the collapse of personal responsibility in an age of therapeutic narcissism. Every villain now has a syndrome, a trauma, a chemical imbalance. The murderer becomes a victim of his own biology. The state becomes a therapist. Society becomes an accomplice. It is the Roman Empire in its twilight, where everyone blamed the stars for their sins and the barbarians danced at the gates.
The British precedent is instructive. M’Naghten was shot by a guard during his attack and later acquitted on the grounds of insanity. He spent the rest of his life in Bethlem Hospital, the infamous Bedlam. The public was outraged. The Queen herself felt insulted. And yet, the Lords embraced the rules as a necessary check on the gallows. So too now: we have abolished capital punishment for state crimes, replaced it with life without parole, and still we seek to soften the blow with diagnoses. We are afraid of vengeance, so we medicalise evil.
This is intellectual decadence. The Victorians, for all their priggishness, understood that a man who knows the difference between right and wrong must be held accountable. They distinguished between the raving lunatic and the cunning rogue. Today, we blur the line. Mangione, if the press is to be believed, is no gibbering fool. He is articulate, deliberate, and possibly quite dangerous. The insanity plea is a lawyer’s trick, a way to escape the moral weight of the verdict. It is the death of common sense.
And what of national identity? The Mangione case, like so many modern American trials, has become a circus. The public devours every detail, from the victim’s family’s tears to the defendant’s vacant stares. We are entertained by tragedy. The M’Naghten Rules were an attempt to import British rationality into a colonial legal system. But America long ago shed that cloak. Now, it borrows precedents as fashion statements, not as binding principles. The result is a patchwork of jurisprudence that serves neither justice nor mercy.
I say: let Mangione stand trial on the facts. Did he pull the trigger? Yes. Did he know it was wrong? Probably. Then let the jury decide, without the fog of psychiatric jargon. If he is mad, lock him in a hospital. If he is bad, lock him in a prison. But do not pretend that citing an ancient British case elevates the proceedings. It merely shows that we have run out of ideas, and now we steal from the dead.
In the end, the Mangione defence is a symptom of our time: a culture that cannot stomach guilt, that prefers a diagnosis to a sentence. It is the way of the late empire, wheezing its last through courtrooms and clinics. We would do well to remember M’Naghten’s own fate: he died in Bedlam, forgotten. The rules survived him. But for how long?
