Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host Ashley Flowers, and I'm back on this Labor Day Monday with

your 8th out of 10 bonus precedent episodes. Now, in this episode, I'll be discussing something

that every one of us has probably heard about, or at least seen on television or in the

movies. It's a common defense strategy, one that we see in cases where a person is accused

of a particularly gruesome or disturbing crime, most often murder. People like Andrea Yates,

the Houston mother, who in 2001 drowned her five young children in a bathtub, and Ed

Gehn, who murdered two women in Wisconsin and used the skulls, skin, and body parts of

eight others to make clothing, masks, and even a chair. Others like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey

Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy attempted the defense, and were denied. But all of them claimed

that they were not guilty by reason of insanity. But what does that mean? Who decides? And

what are we measuring these claims against? Well, that measuring stick can be tracked all

the way back to 1843, and we are still using that same reference point almost 200 years

later. Before there was not guilty by reason of insanity, there was Daniel McNaughton. This

is his story.

On the cold morning of January 20th, 1843, a man named Edward Drummond was walking from

his apartment on Downing Street in Whitehall Gardens, London, to his boss's office a few

blocks away. Edward was a close personal friend and associate of England's prime minister

at the time, a man by the name of Sir Robert Peel. The two men both lived and worked near

the palace of Whitehall and would constantly be walking back and forth between government

buildings or to a local cafe. On this particular morning, just as Edward was leaving the prime

minister's quarters at 10 Downing Street to grab a cup of coffee, a stranger came up behind

him on the sidewalk and fired a pistol point blank right into his back. Immediately after

...