Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume X.djvu/724

 718 LUNACY LUNALILO test of insanity. It was there held that if a Sarty under a real and firm though insane be- ef do an act which would be justifiable if the imaginary fact existed, then he is not respon- sible. The tests already considered, namely, the consciousness of right and wrong, and de- lusion, apply to the intellectual faculties alone. But the moral faculties, not less than the intel- lectual, may become deranged. Passions and propensities may be so extremely developed as to destroy the balance of the mind and defeat the supremacy of the will. This condition of mental disorder, moral insanity, as it is called, has received a partial recognition by the law. The nicer degrees of it, for which medical men contend, have not found so much favor in the eyes of the courts. When the claim of indul- gence for this sort of mental infirmity has been plainly reasonable, it has however been admit- ted and favored. This has been the case in re- spect to that form of insanity known as homi- cidal mania. The perpetrator may be perfect- ly capable of distinguishing right from wrong, not only abstractly, but also in reference to the particular act. Further, there may e, in fact generally is, no delusion in respect to the vic- tim. The act is the offspring of an uncontrol- lable impulse ; the party knows the nature of the act which he is about to commit, but has not the power to choose otherwise than as he does; and because the will is not here con- cerned, the homicide is not answerable for his act. So far then as adjudicated cases go, in- sanity is admitted as a good plea : 1, when at the commission of the act the offender was in- capable of distinguishing whether it was right or wrong ; 2, when the act was done under a delusion in respect to the existence of facts which, had they actually existed, would have constituted a good defence ; and 3, if the act were committed under the influence of mental disease great enough to overpower the will, though neither delusion nor any like provoca- tion of the act be discovered. But it is not to be denied that the whole- subject is surrounded by difficulties which lead to the most startling anomalies in practice. Mr. Bishop, in his trea- tise on criminal law ( 474), well says: "The labors of writers on insanity have been exhaust- ed in attempts to find some test of ready ap- plication to determine when a person is to be deemed insane, and when not, in reference to his responsibility for crime. And judges, less informed on this subject than on most other subjects of legal science, have struggled under the inherent embarrassments of the question itself, under the influence of erroneous notions in the community, and under the failures of counsel and witnesses in particular cases to present the real points of inquiry. The result has been that instructions given in reference to particular facts appearing in the cases before them have seemed to casual observers to be very discordant, while to scientific inquirers after the facts of insanity they have seemed very absurd." The conflicting views of scien- tific men regarding the tests of insanity, which enable parties in all important cases to bewil- der the jury with conflicting testimony of ex- perts, have done much to discredit unjustly all expert testimony ; and the resort to the defence of insanity when homicide has been committed in revenge for actual or pretended domestic wrongs, has thrown suspicion and discredit on the defence generally. Besides the English and Massachusetts cases referred to above, and which have considered the subject of criminal capacity in persons insane or laboring under delusion, the important cases of Freeman v. People, 4 Denio, 9 ; Commonwealth. Mosler, 4 Penn. State R., 267 ; Flanagan v. People, 52 New York, 467 ; State v. Spencer, 1 Zabriskie (N. J.), 196; State v. Felter, 25 Iowa, 67; and State. Jones, 50 N. H., 369, may be named, which however, in some particulars, are wholly irreconcilable with each other or with the Eng- lish cases. The tendency of decision has been in the direction of giving more latitude to the jury in judging of the symptoms and tests of mental disease ; and this culminated in the trial of Cole in New York, for the murder of one whom he charged with adultery with his wife, in which the jury, in substance, found that the accused was insane at the moment of com- mitting the act, but sane immediately before and immediately afterward. LUNALILO, William harles, sixth king of the Hawaiian Islands, born in Honolulu, Jan. 31, 1835, died there, Feb. 3, 1874. He was descend- ed from the chieftain Keoua, the father of Kamehameha I., who united the islands under one government. Lunalilo's mother, Kekau- luohi, was the daughter of Kaleimamahu, a half brother of Kamehameha I. In Hawaiian descent the maternal rather than the paternal lineage ennobles ; and Lunalilo thus inherited from his mother the highest rank among the hereditary chiefs, though his father, Charles Kanaina, the second husband of Kekauluohi, was a commoner. Lunalilo was educated at the royal school established by the American missionaries at Honolulu in 1839. There, in company with Kamehameha IV. and V., and other scions of the chiefs, he became well versed in the common branches of an English education, displaying particular tastes for lit- erature and poetry. In 1860 he visited Cali- fornia with the chiefs Lot and David, who re- spectively preceded and succeeded him as king. His disposition was amiable. Before his acces- sion to the throne his habits were dissipated, but he became a good and popular ruler. His pre- decessor, Kamehameha V., died Dec. 11, 1872, without appointing a successor. On Jan. 1, 1873, Lunalilo received the votes of nearly all the electors in the kingdom ; on the 8th of the same month the legislature confirmed his elec- tion; and on the 9th he was crowned king. He too died without appointing a successor, af- ter a reign of one year and 25 days ; and on the 12th of the same month the chief David Kala- kaua was appointed king by the legislature.