The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [291]
But what about all the other cases what Mr. Picton and Dr. Kreizler had brought up, Mr. Darrow’d then asked, cases involving women who’d unquestionably murdered their own children and been found sane by courts and juries? What about Lydia Sherman, for instance? Lydia Sherman, Dr. White’d replied, had unfortunately committed her crimes during a time when mental science was in a much more primitive state; on top of that, people had been so disgusted by the killings that “Queen Poisoner” had been accused of, and there’d been so much evidence and so many witnesses to speak against her, that the possibility of her getting a fair trial, much less being found mentally incompetent, had been about zero. The alienists of the time had been too unsophisticated to understand what’d been wrong with the woman, and the public had been desperate for revenge: this was Dr. White’s simple explanation for why Lydia Sherman’s fate had been sealed. Mr. Darrow’d then asked Dr. White if, in his opinion, this injustice was now being repeated, maybe even outdone, by the state of New York’s attempt to convict and execute Libby Hatch? Yes, Dr. White had solemnly answered; in fact, since Libby Hatch was, in his opinion, innocent, the injustice was even greater.
Finally, there’d been Mrs. Cady Stanton to seal the deal for the defense. Mr. Darrow’s questioning of her had been particularly clever: as a lifelong battler for women’s rights, he’d asked, didn’t Mrs. Cady Stanton feel that members of her sex had to accept all of the burdens as well as the advantages of equality? Didn’t she think that they shouldn’t be allowed to “hide behind their skirts,” to use their gender as an excuse or even an explanation for certain crimes? Of course, Mrs. Cady Stanton had said; and if the crime Libby Hatch had been accused of had been anything other than murdering her own children, the old suffragist wouldn’t have bothered traveling to Ballston Spa to give testimony. But in this one thing, childbirth and parenting, she said, men and women were not and never could be equal. Repeating what she’d told us when she came to Number 808 Broadway, Mrs. Cady Stanton had lectured the jury and the galleries about the “divine creative power” of women that was made manifest in the connection between a mother and child. If that power was used for evil purposes, she said, it could not be the woman’s doing—after all, no woman could possibly betray a force what, being divine, was greater than her own will. No, if a woman did commit violence against her own child, it was either because she was insane or because the society of men had forced her into it somehow; probably both.
This last point was tough for Mr. Picton to argue on cross-examination; for he, during his time with Dr. Kreizler, had come to understand how very much Libby Hatch’s actions might indeed have been affected by the society of men. But both Mr. Picton and the Doctor held that, such effects aside, Libby was still legally responsible for her own actions, and Mr. Picton had asked Mrs. Cady Stanton if she didn’t agree. No, she’d answered, throwing the Doctor a look what said that, though she wasn’t allowed to speak of it, she did believe that he was involved in some kind of mysterious witch-hunt. No, she said, a woman so harried and hounded as to be capable of murdering her own children must certainly have been driven insane—certainly legally insane, meaning unaware of the nature of her acts or that they were wrong—by man’s society. And since neither the prosecution’s nor the defense’s expert mental witnesses had found Libby to in fact be insane, she could not have committed the crimes.
It had taken only a day to get all this testimony in, and measured as a whole it represented, Mr. Picton said, further proof (not that we