We venture to think that there was recently a considerable rapprochement between the judicial and the medical mode of viewing certain criminal acts. Friendly intercourse between judges and mental physicians has had the beneficial effect of opening the eyes of some of the former to the real nature of crimes committed by the insane, while very possibly the latter have derived benefit from the free intercommunication of ideas in regard to a just judgment of matters upon which lawyers and physicians must at bottom have a common object—simple justice. We are sure that no judge really wishes an irresponsible man to be punished, and it is very certain no medical man wishes the guilty criminal to escape the penalties of the law. There are occasions, however, when we think that judges are somewhat unduly disposed to set aside the evidence of medical men, and not only to lay down the law, but to go out of their way to influence the jury in a direction contrary to that of the medical opinion given in evidence. As an example of judicial discourtesy we might instance the petulant language of Baron Huddleston in the course of a trial at the Devon and Cornwall Assizes last November, in which he seemed to us to forget the golden rule in his brusque treatment of a medical witness. And, again, the same judge more recently acted in a way which has somewhat rudely shaken the hope and belief above expressed, and made us fear that our judges may sometimes “indifferently minister justice” in the least favourable construction of that phrase. At the Winchester assizes, in November, a young man (Russell) was charged before Baron Huddleston with murdering his grandmother. Among other witnesses, Dr. J. G. Symes, for thirty years Superintendent of the Dorset County Asylum, who had examined the prisoner by desire of the Home Office, alleged that he was of low intellect, from his mode of answering questions and his general appearance. He appeared indifferent to his position and to the act he had committed. He did not display any excitement or delusions during the interview, and appeared to know right from wrong, but, in his report to the Treasury, Dr. Symes stated that at the time of the murder he was, in his belief, of unsound mind, an opinion the judge would not allow him to express in Court. The prisoner had had fits. In his summing up, the judge animadverted upon the evidence of medical men, and he thought it proper to assert that they usurped the functions of a jury in getting into the witness-box to show their knowledge and ventilate their own fancies and theories without being able to give the reasons on which they based their conclusions. Happily, the jury, while finding the prisoner guilty of murder, strongly recommended him to mercy on account of weak intellect, and he has heen reprieved.
