The fashion of claiming insanity after slaughtering your husband, neighbour or stranger in front of CCTV cameras or the general public is nothing new.
In America for half a century from the 1850s the defence was that the accused had been driven mad at the time he shot/strangled/knifed his wife/family acquaintance/stranger — but once the deed was done he had reverted to sanity. The insanity passed and with it his danger to the public. He was mad at the time so he could not be punished … and now he was sane again he could safely resume his position in the community. He was therefore entitled to an acquittal and an immediate release.
The credit for the “temporary insanity” defence goes to Edwin Stanton, a Washington lawyer, who was leading the defence of Daniel Sickles, a congressman. Sickles had married Teresa, the daughter of Antonio Bagioli, an Italian opera singer.
Sickles, tipped off by an anonymous note, killed his wife’s lover, Philip Barton Key II, a former district attorney in Washington and the son of Francis Scott Key, the author of The Star-Spangled Banner, a poem that became the country’s national anthem.
On February 27, 1859, Sickles shot Key four times in Lafayette Square, saying: “You scoundrel. You have dishonoured my home. You must die.” He immediately surrendered himself to the attorney-general, claiming that he had been driven temporarily insane by his wife’s infidelity.
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That was certainly a case of pot and kettle because both men were noted womanisers. Sickles had not only taken a high-class brothel-owner, Fanny White, into congress but, using the name of a rival New York politician, he also escorted her to England, where she was presented to Queen Victoria.
The case was also an early example of victim blaming. The newspapers were very much on his side, with Harper’s Magazine suggesting that Sickles was a hero for “saving the ladies of Washington from the rogue named Key”.
Sickles stood trial in April 1859 with rumours that the president, James Buchanan, “desired an acquittal”, which prompted suggestions the prosecution did not make much of an effort during the three-week hearing. Teresa’s confession was not admitted in evidence. Generously sprinkling his statement with biblical quotations, defence lawyer John Graham described Sickles’ action as no less than the execution of “the will of Heaven”.
Another of Sickles’ counsel addressed the jury for three days. With lengthy biblical quotations, Stanton’s closing speech was described as “a typical piece of Victorian rhetoric; an ingenious thesaurus of aphorisms on the sanctity of the family”.
On April 26, Sickles was acquitted in less than an hour to a “wild, loud, thrilling tempestuous hurrah” from the public gallery. Stanton “capered around in a manner which would have done no discredit to a French dancing professor”, according to one report. And that night the acquitted man gave a party for 1,500 guests.
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William Howe, an Englishman who became a doyen of the New York Bar, refined and developed the defence to an extent that temporary insanity could last months if not years, cured only by the killing of the person causing the condition.
At first this worked, with juries baffled by the claims of alienists — the American term for a psychiatrist who assesses defendants in court — and the theories of the Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, whose works Howe had studied. In 1873 he even managed to obtain a manslaughter verdict for Robert Bleakley, who shot his niece when she refused to leave the brothel where she worked.
But, as the years passed and more and more killers claimed temporary insanity, the defence worked more rarely. Certainly, it might save the man from the electric chair, but it also meant a lengthy spell in an asylum, as Stanford White found to his cost in the 1906 “girl in the red velvet swing murder”, when he expected to walk free.
In modern cases, it serves only to reduce a murder charge to a manslaughter conviction. Mêmes temps, autres moeurs.
James Morton is an author and former criminal law solicitor
