State v. Guido case brief

State v. Guido Defendant wanted a divorce from her husband but he would not grant it. While her husband was sleeping she went into her room with a loaded semiautomatic with the intention of ending her life. Deciding that suicide was not the answer she went to put the gun away but when her eyes fell on her husband she raised the weapon and fired until it was empty.

• The real issue is that the M’Naghten rule does not identify the disease which will excuse, but rather stresses a specific effect of disease, i.e., that at the time of the committing of the act the accused was laboring under a defect of reason such 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 what he was doing was wrong.
• The traditional charge of the M’Naghten rule to the jury does not attempt to say what is meant by “disease,” and there is a rather universal reluctance to assay a definition.

• Is “mental disease” a medical or a legal concept? If the former, why was it legitimate for defense counsel to tell the psychiatrists what it meant? But if the latter, why were the psychiatrists allowed to express their conclusion about it at all? In what sense were they “experts” in the meaning of a legal concept.