Courts and Criminals

by Arthur Cheney Train

The result is a rather paradoxical situation: The attitude of the ordinary jury in a homicide case, where the defence of insanity is interposed, is usually at the outset one of distrust, and their impulse is to brush the claim aside. This tendency is strengthened by the legal presumption, which the prosecutor invariably calls to their attention, that the defendant is sane. Every expert who has testified for the defence in the ordinary "knock down and drag out" homicide case must have felt with the prisoner's attorneys, that it was "up to them" not so much to create a doubt of the defendant's sanity as to prove that he was insane, if they expected consideration from the jury.

Now let us assume that the defence is meritorious and that the prisoner's experts have created a favorable impression. Let us go even further and assume that they have generated a reasonable doubt in the mind of the jury as to the defendant's responsibility at the time he committed the offence. What generally occurs? Not, as one would suppose, an acquittal, but, in nine cases out of ten, a conviction in a lower degree.

The only usual result of an honest claim of irresponsibility on the ground of insanity is to lead the jury to reduce the grade of the offence from murder in the first, entailing the death penalty, to murder in the second degree. The jury have no intention of "taking the chance" involved in turning the man loose on the community and their minds are filled with the predominating fact that a human being has been killed. They have an idea that it is as easy to get "sworn out" of a lunatic asylum as they suppose it is to get "sworn into" one, and they know that if the prisoner is found to be insane when sent to State's prison he will be transferred elsewhere. They, therefore, as a rule, waste little time upon the question of how far the defendant was irresponsible within the legal definition when he committed the deed, but convict him "on general principles," trusting the prison officials to remedy any possible injustice. The jury in such cases ignore the law and decline either to acquit or to convict in accordance with the test. Their action becomes rather that of a lay commission condemning the prisoner to hard labor for life on the ground that he is medically insane.

Assuming that the jury take the defence seriously, there is only one class of cases where, in the writer's opinion, they follow the legal test as laid down by the court—that is to say, in cases of extreme brutality. Here they hold the prisoner to the letter of the law, and the more abhorrent the crime (even where its nature might indicate to a physician that the accused was the victim of some sort of mania) the less likely they are to acquit. The writer has prosecuted perhaps a dozen homicide and other cases where the defence was insanity. In his own experience he has known of no acquittal. In several instances the defendants were undoubtedly insane, but, strictly speaking, probably vaguely knew the nature and quality of their acts and that they were wrong. In a few of these the juries convicted of murder in the first degree because the circumstances surrounding the homicides were so brutal that the harshness of the technical doctrine they were required to apply was overshadowed in their minds by their horror of the act itself. In other cases, where either the accused appeared obviously abnormal as he sat at the bar of justice, or the details of the crime were less abhorrent, they convicted of murder in the second degree in accordance with the reasoning set forth in the foregoing paragraph. The writer seriously advances the suggestion that the more the brutality of a homicide indicates mental derangement the less chance the defendant has to secure an acquittal upon the plea of insanity.

And this leads us to that increasingly large body of cases where the usual scepticism of the jury in regard to such defences is counterbalanced by some real or imaginary element of sympathy. In cities like New York, where the jury system is seen at its very best, where the statistics show seventy per cent. of convictions by verdict for the year 1907, and where the sentiment of the community is against the invocation of any law supposedly higher than that of the State, our talesmen are unwilling to condone homicide or to act as self-constituted pardoning bodies, for they know that an obviously lawless verdict will bring down upon them the censure of the public and the press. This is perhaps demonstrated by the fact that in New York County a higher percentage of women are convicted of homicide than of men.

But the plea of insanity, with its vague test of responsibility, whose terms the juryman may construe for himself (or which his fellow-jurors may construe for him) offers an unlimited and fertile field for the "reasonable" doubt and an easy excuse for the conscientious talesman who wants to acquit if he can. Juries take the little stock in irresistible impulses and emotional or temporary insanity save as a cloak to cover an unrighteous acquittal.

In no other class of cases does "luck" play so large a part in the final disposition of the prisoner. A jury is quite as likely to send an insane man to the electric chair as to acquit a defendant who is fully responsible for his crime.

To recapitulate from the writer's experience:

(1) The ordinary juror tends to be sceptical as to the good faith of the defence of insanity.

(2) When once this distrust is removed by honest evidence on the part of the defence, he usually declines to follow the legal test as laid down by the court on the general theory that any one but an idiot or a maniac has some knowledge of what he is doing and whether it is right or wrong.