''R v Sullivan''
984AC 156 is a British
House of Lords
The House of Lords, also known as the House of Peers, is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Membership is by appointment, heredity or official function. Like the House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster ...
case in
criminal law, and a leading modern authority on the common law defence of
insanity
Insanity, madness, lunacy, and craziness are behaviors performed by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns. Insanity can be manifest as violations of societal norms, including a person or persons becoming a danger to themselves or to ...
.
Facts
The defendant, who had had
epilepsy
Epilepsy is a group of non-communicable neurological disorders characterized by recurrent epileptic seizures. Epileptic seizures can vary from brief and nearly undetectable periods to long periods of vigorous shaking due to abnormal electrical ...
since childhood, kicked the victim, his friend, during an
epileptic seizure
An epileptic seizure, informally known as a seizure, is a period of symptoms due to abnormally excessive or neural oscillation, synchronous neuronal activity in the brain. Outward effects vary from uncontrolled shaking movements involving much o ...
while he was sitting in his neighbour's flat on 8 May 1981. Upon recovery, the defendant only remembered the incident where he was standing by a window with the victim lying on the floor with head injuries. The defendant was charged with
assault
An assault is the act of committing physical harm or unwanted physical contact upon a person or, in some specific legal definitions, a threat or attempt to commit such an action. It is both a crime and a tort and, therefore, may result in cri ...
. The trial judge ruled that the evidence that the defendant had had a post-epileptic seizure would amount to a disease of the mind, not that of
automatism.
Judgment
The House of Lords held that epilepsy was a disease of the mind due to the defendant's impaired mental faculties causing defect in reasoning. Lord Diplock stated that {{blockquote, "The evidence as to the pathology of a seizure due to psychomotor epilepsy can be sufficiently stated for the purposes of this appeal by saying that after the first stage, the prodram, which precedes the fit itself, there is a second stage, the ictus, lasting a few seconds, during which there are electrical discharges into the temporal lobes of the brain of the sufferer. The effect of these discharges is to cause him in the postictal stage to make movements which he is not conscious that he is making, including, and this was a characteristic of previous seizures which Mr. Sullivan had suffered, automatic movements of resistance to anyone trying to come to his aid. These movements of resistance might, though in practice they very rarely would, involve violence"
[ 984AC 156]
See also
*
Insanity defense
The insanity defense, also known as the mental disorder defense, is an affirmative defense by excuse in a criminal case, arguing that the defendant is not responsible for their actions due to an episodic psychiatric disease at the time of the ...
*
M'Naghten rules
References
Criminal defenses
House of Lords cases
Insanity-related case law
S
1984 in United Kingdom case law