CHAPTER IV
THE CRIMINAL IMBECILE
From the description already given it will be seen that Roland Pennington is very different from Jean Gianini. Both are imbeciles, but each is an example of a special type. Gianini is of a nervous, impulsive, irritable, loquacious type, fond of show and excitement, a braggart and a coward, with an excellent memory, a great reader—particularly interested in stories of excitement and crime. Pennington, on the contrary, is a slow, dull, relatively stupid boy, of poor memory and slow perception. While having made the fifth grade in school work, he has done it slowly and with not so much success as in the case of Gianini. He is not so much given to talk or to showing off; is somewhat addicted to drink and is exceptionally fond of playing pool.
Gianini’s confession is colored by his desire to show off and shine in the limelight; Pennington’s, on the contrary, is a plain, unelaborated statement of the facts. He is driven to his confession, not by his desire to show off, but in self-defense. His colleague, March, is trying to throw the entire responsibility upon him in order to escape from any condemnation. In the face of this Pennington is prompted to tell his own story. He is not intelligent enough to make up a plausible story which would incriminate March and save himself. But in telling the facts as they occurred he incriminates himself quite as much as March, so far as the actual occurrences are concerned. His whole conduct, from the beginning of the crime until his arrest, is that of a dull, stupid person. He does not even wield the blackjack with intelligence, and after the man is killed by his comrade, he takes no precaution to save himself from suspicion, to dispose of the body or to clean up about the barn and remove the evidences of a crime. And finally, when it comes to a statement of the case, he apparently makes no attempt to shield himself, but acknowledges his part in it, although that part was, as a matter of fact, so slight that a little variation in his testimony would have thrown the entire burden upon March and relieved him from any complicity in the matter.
If the foregoing statement of the case is correct, we ask at once, how it happened that the jury did not see it in this light, but instead brought in a verdict of “Guilty in the first degree”? While there are many elements in the answer, such as the demand of the public for revenge on the murderer of the man who was more or less of a favorite; a hastily drawn jury; a hurried trial, etc., the burden of the explanation falls back upon the same condition which we discovered in the case of Gianini, namely, the ignorance of the general public in regard to this type of feeble-mindedness. Almost every one thinks that he knows an imbecile. We have so long considered these high-grade cases as normal but vicious persons, that it is difficult to change the point of view suddenly and realize that they are not responsible for their deeds.
This failure to recognize the high-grade type of imbecile extended even to the “experts” in the case; for whereas there were three who testified to the feeble-mindedness of the prisoner, there were four or five who testified to his normality. These were four general practitioners of medicine, including the jail physician, and the fifth, a professor of neurology and neuropathology. These gentlemen are all familiar with what we should call the low-grade type of imbecile. They were perfectly correct in declaring that Roland Pennington is not a low-grade imbecile. Not one of them had had experience with the high-grade type. They were, therefore, not qualified to pass upon a case of this kind. It was as though four general practitioners had been brought in to decide a case of obscure insanity. Every one of them could have testified that he had had more or less to do with insane people, meaning persons who are maniacal or strongly melancholic or katatonic, but what would be the value of the testimony of such men in such a case, for instance, as that of Thaw?
These men all thought they knew something about high-grade feeble-mindedness. They all testified that Pennington was a normal man. Compare this with the statement of Dr. Martin W. Barr, one of the foremost authorities on feeble-mindedness in the United States—indeed, in the world. Dr. Barr says (Alienist and Neurologist, November, 1914, page 367):—
“The courts simply do not go far enough back; they fail in that they do not reach the inception—the root of the matter. They often punish without careful investigation of the causes from which criminal instinct springs—the environment, family history, inherited tendencies, physical disability, and that susceptibility to suggestion which makes them the ready tools of the vicious.
“In the case of Roland Pennington, tried in Media last June, for aiding in the murder of a man, it was proven that the boy, although almost twenty in actual age, yet coming from a neurotic stock, with three first cousins imbecile, had mentally only attained some 11 or 12 years; still he was adjudged responsible, and murder in the first degree was the verdict.
“Is it not a poor law that first permits a person to commit a crime, and then punishes him for it, not recognizing that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?