Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [94]
Or take, for example, the trial of Laura Fair, who shot and killed her lover, A. P. Crittenden, a San Francisco lawyer, on a crowded ferryboat sailing between Oakland and San Francisco. Her trial was the sensation of 1871. Since she had obviously pulled the trigger, she needed a fairly creative line of defense. Her lawyers tried temporary insanity: when she fired the shot, they argued, her mind was in a “state of semi-unconsciousness”; the act was “non-volitional,” brought about by “hysterical mania,” which was, in turn, occasioned by an “anteversion of the womb.”90 Whether the jury paid much attention to this mumbo jumbo is hard to know. The real issue, one suspects, was Laura’s character: Was she a wronged, jilted woman, driven to violence by a philanderer; or was she a shameless hussy who killed a married man because he refused to abandon his wife and marry her? Insanity was merely the legal hook on which this dramatic choice was hung. In any event, Laura went free. ag
In the twentieth century, these cases of “temporary insanity” might be called cases about the doctrine of diminished responsibility. In some cases, of course, “insanity” merely disguised one form of jury nullification; it was an excuse for upholding this or that “unwritten law.” In another group of cases, the defendant’s excuse (if you can call it that) was total drunkenness. But these cases, too, shed light on the social meaning of criminal responsibility. Was it a valid defense that the defendant was so dead drunk, so befuddled by liquor, that he had no idea what he was doing?
Strictly speaking, “voluntary intoxication” was “no excuse for crime committed under its influence.”92 This was standard doctrine in the law books. But—and this, too, was standard doctrine—the definition of many crimes included a requirement of some specific “intent,” some particular frame of mind. Murder in the first degree, for example, was a crime of “malice.” Malice was a difficult concept; it implied some kind of intent, or plan, or design—an impulsive, heat-of-passion murder did not qualify as murder with malice. Could you, then, be so far gone in liquor that you could not make the grade as a first-degree murderer?
Terrence Hammill was indicted for murdering his wife on New Year’s Day, 1855 in New York. He was found in his house “in the act of stamping upon his wife,” who died a few minutes later. Her body “exhibited marks of the most brutal violence, the head and chest being covered with bruises and blood.” The prisoner, “who wore heavy iron-nailed shoes,” had stamped her to death. Both of them were completely drunk at the time; an empty liquor bottle was found at the scene.93
The prosecution accused Hammill of cold-blooded murder; the defense urged a lesser charge, “manslaughter in the second degree.” Hammill’s lawyers tried to show that he was a man of “excellent character, unusually industrious and frugal,” and “kind, attentive and affectionate to all of his family.” Usually he was “strictly temperate.” But when he did drink, what a difference: he became “infuriated and ungovernable, attacking any one who came in his way.” The judge charged the jury that drunkenness as such was no excuse for a crime. But the drunkenness was not irrelevant. It bore on the question of intent: Did he mean to kill his wife? If his judgment was “in part obscured and his only intention was to severely beat his wife but with no thoughts of death,” the jury might, if it wished, convict him of a lesser crime than murder. And so they did: they came back with a verdict of manslaughter in the second degree.94
These cases are still another reflex of the nineteenth-century emphasis on discipline and self-control. These traits were precious but fragile; when a person