Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [93]
The most “advanced” views of insanity were to be found, oddly enough, in the small state of New Hampshire. New Hampshire jurists, notably Justice Charles Doe, were attracted to the ideas of Dr. Isaac Ray, who was the leading expert on the “medical jurisprudence of insanity.” In State v. Pike (1869)84 the defendant, Josiah Pike, stood accused of murdering one Thomas Brown with an ax. He claimed to be suffering from “a species of insanity called dipsomania.” Doe was one of the trial judges; when he instructed the jury, he told them they had the right to acquit Pike “by reason of insanity” if the killing was the “offspring or product of mental disease in the defendant.” Doe also told the jury that there was no single rigid test of “mental disease,” certainly not “knowledge of right and wrong”; rather, “all symptoms and all tests of mental disease are purely matters of fact,” grist for the jury’s mill.85
The jury convicted Pike anyway; but Doe’s formulation continued to be cited. In his opinion in Pike’s case, Charles Doe said that “insanity has been for the most part, a growth of the modern state of society. Like many other diseases, it is caused, in a great degree, by the habits and incidents of civilized life.” He also felt that the law should abandon “old exploded medical theories” and embrace “facts established in the progress of scientific knowledge.”86 These two ideas were connected. Civilization was the wellspring of progress; it brought about democracy, science, medicine, technology; but it was, at the same time, a source of danger to society. Civilization was complex and stood in a delicate balance: modern life—rapid, unsettling, mobile—could drive certain persons insane.
Ideas about mental disease were rapidly evolving in the nineteenth century, and their progress can be marked in a series of notable trials. Perhaps the most famous of these was the trial of Charles Guiteau. Whether this trial represented any sort of “progress” is questionable. Guiteau, born in 1841, shot President James Garfield in Washington, D.C., on July 2, 1881, in the Baltimore and Potomac Train Station as the president was about to leave on a trip. Two months later, the president died of his wounds. Guiteau’s trial was a long, drawn-out affair, a courtroom drama in which rival psychiatric schools battled for the attention of judge and jury. In fact, the jury deliberated only an hour or so, and the verdict was almost a foregone conclusion: guilty as charged. Guiteau was sentenced to death, and on June 30, 1882, the black cap was put over his face and he was hanged.87
To the modem eye, Charles Guiteau would seem completely deranged. His behavior throughout the trial was bizarre; as he stood in front of the gallows, he recited a “pathetic” hymn he had written hours before, in a high-pitched child’s voice, beginning with the words, “I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad.” Even some of his contemporaries remarked on his “obvious imbecility” and thought he would have escaped with his life if he had killed anyone but the President of the United States. Many psychiatrists were convinced he was a heredity degenerate; if so, it was as illogical to kill him, as one journalist put it, “as it is to kill a cave fish for not seeing.”88
The Guiteau case represents, then, one extreme: the crime was such that the jury (and public opinion) would not accept the insanity defense; the rage to punish was too great. A small group of cases—they tended, however, to be quite notorious—stood at the other extreme. In these cases, the insanity defense was little better than a figleaf, an excuse for killing, hatched by desperate or inventive defense counsel. These were cases were the defendant was very sympathetic, or the victim very unsympathetic.
One such use of the insanity defense apparently made its debut in the sensational trial of Daniel Sickles, in Washington, D.C., in 1859. Sickles, a congressman from New York, shot and killed