Summary
Mandelbrot v. Attorney General, as Lahav presents it: Simon Agranat’s opinion (1954, a year after his American visit) recognising an irresistible-impulse insanity defense in Israeli criminal law, against a forty-page critique of the M’Naghten rules — one of the two opinions (with Kol ha-Am) Agranat after retirement singled out as his best (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1385-1434).
Details
- Zalman Mandelbrot, diagnosed paranoid, had shot and wounded a woman and killed a man in a Haifa textile factory; he understood his act was legally prohibited, which under section 14 of the Criminal Code Ordinance (the M’Naghten rules) made him responsible, and the district court convicted (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1385-1405).
- The panel split three ways: Silberg reinterpreted the facts within the black-letter law; Goitein dissented, calling Agranat’s opinion “a little too daring … one which finds no support in the language or import of the law” and urging judicial restraint (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1395-1415).
- Agranat located the defense in section 11 of the Criminal Code, rejecting the Cartesian premise that “man lives in fact by his reason alone” — man’s “ego” uniting will and emotions inseparably — and holding that a “sense of justice and morality”, prior to utilitarian deterrence, must govern the law’s treatment of the insane (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1405-1430).
- Lahav reads the opinion as Agranat’s mature judicial vocation: judging as responsible participation in building the good society, within acceptable legal analysis, where his American Progressivism and his Zionist ideology coalesced (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1420-1434).
Related pages
Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Simon Agranat, Podamsky Case, Kol Ha’am Case