from "partial insanity," where the lunatic had an intact "use of reason" on most subjects. By the late seventeenth century, the insanity defense was firmly in place. The insanity defense was no longer just an exemption from the law based on sympathy and assessment of the prisoner's mental state. It was part of the law; as Matthew Hale put it "a system of criminal law that required a guilty mind for conviction must necessarily acquit those who were out of their minds, who were inadvertently led into crime by the most innocent of intentions."#
The theories of Coke and Hale had a great influence on legal thinking about the insanity defense, but its true development occurred i
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