LUNATICS CARE AND TREATMENT BILL. (Hansard, 11 August 1853)

§ MR. MICHELL
moved the following clause:— 1603 Provided also, That it shall not be lawful for a proprietor or superintendent of any licensed house, to keep or confine beyond the period of six months any person admitted into such house as a lunatic under the provisions of this Act, unless a jury, as in the case of a writ de lunatico inquirendo, shall have been summoned to ascertain the lunacy of such person; on the unanimous finding of this jury, the person shall be discharged or detained, as the case may be; if the jurors cannot agree, then the person shall be transferred to the nearest county lunatic asylum, as provided for by Clause 20. While protection, he said, was extended to the poorer classes of lunatics, those who were richer were left without it, especially as regarded their detention in the asylums. It had been said that he had complained that the keepers of private asylums treated their patients with cruelty; but this was only the fact in a limited sense. So far as personal treatment went, there was nothing calling for complaint; but it was his opinion that, in many instances, persons were detained in the asylum for a longer period than was necessary. This was a cruelty which he thought it his duty to endeavour to provide against.

§ MR. WALPOLE
moved to add the following clause:— And whereas by the said recited Act it is provided that every person to be appointed in the room of any Commissioner, being a barrister of five years' standing at the bar, and upwards, shall be a practicing barrister of not less than five years' standing at the bar; and whereas it is expedient to amend the said provisions as hereinafter mentioned, the present or any future Secretary to the Commissioners, if at the time of his appointment to be such Secretary he was or shall have been a practicing barrister of not less than five years' standing at the bar, shall be eligible to be appointed a Commissioner in the room of any such Commissioner as aforesaid.

§ MR. FRESHFIELD
said, that in the present state of the law, a great hardship, he would rather Say a great injustice, attached to the situation of persons considered as criminal lunatics, by which term was not to be understood generally persons who had committed acts of great violence, but acquitted by juries on the ground of insanity so unequivocal as to relieve them from criminal responsibility; but it not unfrequently happened that persons became subjects of criminal charge of a very minor character, but when in custody their sanity became matter of inquiry, and in the end it became a question whether the magistrate should require sureties to keep the peace, or pursue the provisions of 1604 the Act 3 & 4 Vict. c. 52; and in this latter alternative, if the accused Person was certified to one of Her Majesty's Principal Secretaries of State to be of unsound mind, and should in consequence be committed by him to some lunatic asylum or other place of confinement, that commitment would not be during pleasure, but till it should be certified by two physicians or surgeons that such person had become of sound mind. No power was possessed by visiting committees of lunatic asylums to discharge the individual, as in the case of ordinary lunatics, nor was any discretion vested in the Secretary of State. It might be that the patient had become harmless; his primary enmity and sense of injustice, out of which the conduct originally complained of, might have abated; his confinement and a course of treatment as a prisoner might tend to aggravate his mental weakness, but some matter of delusion resting on the mind delayed the hope of such a certificate being obtained as the law required, and every day of delay rendered it more probable that the case would fall into the chronic class, and exclude the prospect of the medical certificate; and though the improved and harmless state of the patient should be shown to the Secretary of State upon the best authority, medical and otherwise, still the official person was powerless; and it had happened that, persons, who might, in the exercise of a safe discretion, have been delivered over to the care of their friends, were on the contrary continued in confinement until released by death. He, therefore, intended to propose a change, which he trusted would be deemed safe as well as humane; it was merely to give the Secretary of State a discretionary power. He should not propose that the qualified certificate of two medical men, in the stead of the positive certificate now required, should be obligatory upon the Secretary of State; but it would leave that officer, after receiving such certificate as the Amendment contemplated, still at full liberty to exercise as much caution as he thought proper. He might, if lie chose, ask for further information—for a report from the visiting justices as to the case in all its stages—in short, only to exercise the power when all doubt was removed. With this explanation, he (Mr. Freshfield) moved the Amendment of which he had given notice, which had the assent of his right hon. Friend the Member for Midhurst, who had charge of the Bill, and of the noble Lord 1605 the Secretary of State for the Home Department, namely, at the end of Clause 38, to add— Save as hereinafter provided; that is to say, it shall be lawful for one of Her Majesty's Principal Secretaries of State to issue his warrant to remove or discharge any insane person who shall be in custody under the provisions of the said Act of the 3rd and 4th years of Her Majesty, c. 54, provided it shall be duly certified to such Secretary of State, by two physicians or surgeons, that such insane person was harmless, and might be discharged from restraint as an insane person without danger to himself or to others, in like manner as if it had been certified to such Secretary of State that such person had become of sound mind, anything in the said Act or any other Act to the contrary thereof in any wise notwithstanding.