Perry and Dick’s criminal tendencies are revealed to have underlying medical causes (Perry suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, and Dick has brain damage from a concussion); the difficulty of the murder trial becomes, to what extent are they still accountable for their actions? In 1953, a group of distinguished legal and medical professionals known as the American Law Institute ("ALI") began studying the issue of criminal responsibility. The ALI drafted the Model Penal Code test in 1962 and attempted to solve problems of earlier insanity tests. It was designed to implement some psychiatric advances and to avoid the causation problems present in the Durham test. The ALI Test was viewed as broader more expansive test of insanity as compared to the outdated M'Naghten test. Compared to M'Naghten, it lowered the insanity standard from an absolute knowledge of right from wrong to a substantial incapacity to appreciate the difference between right and wrong; thereby recognizing degrees of incapacity. ALI also broadened the insanity test to include a volitional or "irresistible impulse" component. The test focused …show more content…
Their exhaustive examination of the extensive case-law concerning the defense 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