Acid Language

On 15 December 1937, the Dutch poet Gerrit Achterberg (1905–62) fired two shots at his landlady Roel van Es and her daughter. Van Es died of her wounds. The girl survived, so traumatised that as an adult she was unable to give voice to her experience. The circumstances of this manslaughter were kept out of publications about Achterberg's life for a very long time. It was revealed only in 2002 that, on the fatal evening, the landlady's daughter came to bring Achterberg his evening snack a bit earlier than usual. But here the stories diverge. One has it that the girl caught him in the act of masturbation, while another is that Achterberg, stripped to the waist, suddenly tried to grab her. The girl started screaming, her mother rushed to the rescue, and Achterberg panicked and fired the gun he kept in his room.

For years, he suffered the consequences of his deed. On 2 June 1938, the Utrecht regional court ordered Achterberg's entrustment to the care of a forensic psychiatric institution on the basis of what was then Section 37 of the Dutch Criminal Code, because he was judged to be a sexually deviant psychopath. According to Dutch law, unlike a punishment such as imprisonment, a measure in criminal law – of which an entrustment order is an example – can be imposed on an offender regardless of his diminished responsibility, because the aim of a measure is to promote the safety and security of other people. Thus, if the defendant who suffers from a mental illness or defect is deemed responsible, be it only to a slight degree, an entrustment order may be imposed, with or without another penalty, as happened in the Achterberg case. The defendant then has to undergo treatment in the clinical setting of a forensic psychiatric institution, and the case is reviewed every two years. The decision of whether or not to prolong the measure is taken by a panel of three judges – in Achterberg's days, the Ministry of Justice took the decision – on the basis of new psychiatric reports.

The Dutch debate on the nature and proposed form of the entrustment order raged from 1870 to 1928 before it was brought into effect. The 1886 Dutch Criminal Code followed the classical school of thought, emphasising culpability and retribution on the basis of intent and volition.