Solesbee v. Balkcom

In the history of murder, the onset of insanity while awaiting execution of a death sentence is not a rare phenomenon. The legal problems which such supervening insanity raises happily do not involve explorations of the pathological processes which give rise to the conflict between so-called legal and medical insanity. See M’Naghten’s Case, 10 Cl. & F. 200 (1843); Glueck, Mental Disorder and the Criminal Law passim (1925); Minutes of Evidence before the 1949 Royal Commission on Capital Punishment. The case now before the Court presents a familiar constitutional issue placed in the setting of…