Free Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal by Katherine Ramsland Page B

one of the first cases of parole into an asylum. In that same year, American psychiatrist Isaac Ray published a tract,
Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity
, which laid the basis for forensic psychiatry. Shortly thereafter, in 1843, the issue of insanity challenged a British court.
    Sir Robert Peel, founder of the English Bobbies, was the target of a deranged man who mistook his secretary, William Drummond, for him. Daniel M’Naghten believed that “Tories” were conspiring to murder him, so he shot Drummond as a preemptive act of self-defense. Since M’Naghten had a history of such delusions, his attorney found plenty of support for a defense of madness. His counsel claimed that he had not known what he was doing and was not in control of his acts. The prosecution offered no rebuttal, acknowledging the obvious, so the court declared that the accused must be found not guilty by reason of insanity. M’Naghten was detained in an asylum to keep him from harming anyone else.
    However, since he’d shot a public official, British citizens reacted with anger to this finding, so a royal commission undertook to study the issue. They examined every angle and agreed with the court, formulating a response that became the M’Naghten Rule, and thereafter the House of Lords required that to establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must be proved that “at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the 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.” The legal system in the United States likewise based such decisions on this ruling.
    Throughout the inquiry, there was no mention of M’Naghten’s phrenological profile, but phrenology still had firm adherents. In 1845, German Gustav Zimmermann wrote that if phrenology could accurately identify the marks of “villainy” on a person’s skull, every person age twenty-five and over should submit to a phrenological examination. If they were found to have a dangerous predisposition, they should be hanged or confined so as to prevent them from exercising their criminal propensity. Zimmerman seemed to think it might be possible with a large-scale study to eventually predict a person’s specific type of crime before that crime was ever committed.
    ENTERPRISING DETECTIVES
    Allan Pinkerton, born in Glasgow, Scotland, emigrated to the United States in 1842, and moved to Illinois to make barrels. His first engagement with law enforcement occurred four years later when he identified a gang of counterfeiters. Inspired by Vidocq, he soon became a deputy sheriff for Cook County and then the first police detective in the city of Chicago. He immediately solved a string of post office thefts and went undercover into the gang responsible for the crimes in order to identify its leader. His work on this case became news, which emboldened Pinkerton to found the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. He offered high-quality work and promised to accept no bribes, partner with local law enforcement agencies, refuse cases that initiated scandals, accept no reward money (his agents were paid well), and keep clients fully informed.
    In 1856, he hired the country’s first female detective, Kate Warne. As a childless widow, she’d answered his ad but initially he’d resisted, because the notion that a woman could be a detective seemed implausible. She assured him that there were important places a woman could go to get information, and methods she could use that were not accessible to men. When she persisted, Pinkerton gave her a chance and she proved her worth by showing how easily she could infiltrate high-class social events, where tips about professional crimes were gained with but a little flirtation. In addition, she assisted in uncovering plots against president-elect Abraham Lincoln, and accompanied him as part of the Pinkerton