Durham Rule

The Durham Rule is a test for criminal responsibility under which an accused is not criminally responsible if an unlawful act is the product of mental disease or mental defect. In the book, its significance is practical as well as doctrinal: it becomes the defense’s proposed route to a different legal outcome for Lowell Lee Andrews, but the court retains the stricter M’Naghten Rule.

Definition and Legal Contrast

The Durham Rule makes the relationship between mental illness and the unlawful act central to the responsibility inquiry. The account characterizes it as more lenient than the M’Naghten Rule, which recognizes no form of legal insanity when a defendant can distinguish right from wrong. The contrast is between asking whether disease or defect produced the act and asking whether the accused possessed the legally defined capacity to know right from wrong.

The book describes the M’Naghten Rule as prevailing in most American jurisdictions, while the Durham approach had been adopted by roughly half a dozen states and the District of Columbia. It also notes reservations about Durham: some regarded the test as impractical even while considering it more lenient. The rule therefore appears not as a settled national standard but as a contested alternative in the law of criminal responsibility.

The Andrews Case as a Test of the Rule

Before Andrews’s trial, psychiatrists at the Menninger Clinic examined him and diagnosed schizophrenia, simple type. Their account described a separation of thought from feeling: Andrews understood the nature of his acts, knew they were prohibited, and understood that punishment could follow, but was said to experience no emotions and to regard himself as the only significant person in the world. This diagnosis supplied the medical basis on which the defense sought to make the Durham test consequential.

Andrews’s defenders—psychiatrists from the clinic and two attorneys—hoped to persuade the court to replace the M’Naghten Rule with Durham. Their aim was not merely to establish that Andrews had a mental disorder; it was to make the alleged connection between that disorder and his crime legally decisive. If the court accepted their proposed standard, the account says, the evidence of his condition would have led to confinement in the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane rather than execution or ordinary imprisonment.

Rejection and Consequences

The defense’s effort failed. Reverend Virto C. Dameron, Andrews’s religious counselor, testified for the prosecution about warnings he had given Andrews concerning sin, faith, and accountability before God. His testimony, together with Andrews’s confession, helped settle the case. The judge upheld the M’Naghten Rule, and the jury imposed the death penalty sought by the state.

The outcome marks the Durham Rule’s limit in this episode: its alternative standard could have redirected the case toward psychiatric confinement, but it had no force once the court declined to adopt it. The book presents the trial as a legal and medical challenge whose stakes reached beyond diagnosis to the question of what kind of evidence should determine criminal responsibility. In Andrews’s case, the court’s choice of rule left the distinction between understanding an act and being emotionally capable of responding to it without the legal effect the defense had sought.