Editorial: Brian Mitchell—Religious Insanity and the Law

• Date: 01 August 2004
• Published date: 01 August 2004
• Author: Ralph Slovenko
• DOI: 10.1177/0306624X04265084
• Subject Matter: Articles

Editorial: Brian Mitchell—

Religious Insanity and the Law

Ralph Slovenko

Who would not agree with Elizabeth Smart’suncle, Tom Smart, who said of Brian

Mitchell, “Obviously he is a religious whacko, and a sick person.”Mitchell alleg-

edly was following a spiritual dictate to kidnap Elizabeth as the first of his

intended seven new brides.

“God told Brian Mitchell to take Elizabeth,”said social worker Vicki Cottrell,

executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. “He was doing

what God asked him to do.”

Time and again, when an accused claims to have acted on a religious mission,

the defense counsel or the court enters an insanity plea. Under the prevailing test

of criminal responsibility, individuals are responsible for their actions unless

those actions are caused by a delusional state utterly beyond rational control. The

prevailing test of criminal responsibility is the M’Naghten test, a rule formulated

in England in 1843 that provides that

it must be clearly proved, that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party

accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as

not to knowthe nature and quality of the act he was doing or,if he did know it, that he

did not know he was doing what was wrong.

In the wake of the controversial acquittal by reason of insanity of John

Hinckley for the attempted assassination of President Reagan, Utah, along with

four other states, abandoned the M’Naghten test and provided that a defendant is

guilty of a crime if he intended the committed act, even if the defendant’spercep -

tion of the crime is altered by mental illness. In 1995 in the State v. Herrera, the

Utah Supreme Court noted that, although insanity is no longer an independent de-

fense in the state, defendants are allowed to present evidence rebutting the prose-

cution’s claim of mens rea (criminal intent), a basic element of crime. Mitchell

kidnapped Elizabeth Smart in Utah (kidnapping is also a federal crime).

The leading case on a command from God dates from 1915, a New York

case—People v. Schmidt. The defendant, Hans Schmidt, was accused of killing

and dismembering a woman and throwing her remains into the Hudson River.

Claiming that God had commanded the killing “as a sacrifice and atonement,”he

pleaded insanity. The opinion of the court was written by Judge Benjamin

Cardozo, one of the country’s most renowned judges. He wrote, “There are times

International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 48(4), 2004 399-402

DOI: 10.1177/0306624X04265084

2004 Sage Publications

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