William Eche V. The Queen (1952)

LawGlobal Hub Judgment Report – West African Court of Appeal

Criminal Law—Insanity—Uncontrollable impulse—Criminal Code, section 28

Facts

The appellant struck the deceased with an axe on the head in the night as deceased was sitting in a deck chair outside appellant’s house.

Next morning appellant, when arrested, said that in the previous night he had heard deceased say to someone that he had been paid money to kill him, the appellant, which so angered him that he took an axe and hit the deceased, and then ran away on seeing people gathering.

Some days later he explained in his statement that he sometimes suffered from “brain trouble”—that he saw people surrounding him with weapons to kill him, that he had this delusion that night and drove the imaginary attackers from his house with his axe and struck the deceased whom he saw in the chair—a person he looked on as a son—and that his mental trouble had come on a fortnight earlier.

At his trial he gave evidence excitedly and incoherently. An army report was put in that in 1943 in an explosion he had a serious fracture of the skull. The doctor who had him under observation before trial testified that in his opinion that injury was most likely to affect appellant’s mind and when appellant had an attack he might know what he was doing and that it was wrong but not be able to control his actions.

The trial Judge thought the evidence did not sustain a defence of insanity on the rules in the McNaughton case and convicted of murder.

Section 28 of the Criminal Code reads as follows:—
“28. A person is not criminally responsible for an act or omission if at the time of doing the act or making the omission he is in such a state of mental disease or natural mental infirmity as to deprive him of capacity to understand what he is doing, or of capacity to control his actions, or of capacity to know that he ought not to do the act or make the omission.

“A person whose mind, at the time of his doing or omitting to do an act, is affected by delusions on some specific matter or matters, but who is not otherwise entitled to* the benefit of the foregoing provisions of this section, is criminally responsible for the act or omission to the same extent as if the real state of things had been such as he was induced by the delusions to believe to exist.”

Held

Section 28 of the Criminal Code goes further than the English rules and admits a defence of uncontrollable impulse.

Verdict of guilty but Insane substituted.