The Insanity Plea in Politically Related Trials

In certain dramatic political trials from time to time the insanity plea is invoked and a public outcry arises. The reaction against John Hinckley’s successful insanity defense in 1982 nearly equaled the original stir in 1981 over his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan.

Before we examine some of the above trials, another important case deserves mention. In 1945 Ezra Pound might have been tried for treason but he was not. Because of the insanity plea, the nation was spared seeing one of its most influential poets tried and perhaps given the death penalty. The Pound case illustrates how the insanity plea can be used in a partisan way to the advantage of the accused. In contrast to the political use of law and psychiatry in the Soviet Union, American psychiatrists shielded Ezra Pound and protected him from retribution at St.

Spearheaded by Ernest Hemingway and Archibald MacLeish, who was an assistant secretary in the State Department, Pound’s defenders rallied the names in American letters: T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Allen Tate, William Carlos Williams, as well as publisher James Laughlin, reviewer-poet Dudley Fitts, and psychiatrist-poet Merrill Moore. Pound had written to the attorney general saying that he would use his treason trial to expose Roosevelt and the Jews, but the old-boy-writer network arranged for a lawyer, Julien Cornell, who convinced Pound to acquiesce in a plea that he was unfit for trial because of insanity. Dr. Winfred Overholser, who oversaw the diagnosis with three other psychiatrists, was a leading authority in psychiatry, an officer in the American Psychiatric Association, the superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital, a close friend of Merrill Moore, and an admirer of Pound’s work. In his twelve years at St. Elizabeths under Overholser’s protection, Pound received his best friends—the leading figures in literature—regularly, wrote some of his important work, contributed a prodigious supply of articles to political and literary journals, carried on a vast correspondence, and conducted brisk political activities with his disciple John Kasper who was an organizer for the White Citizens Council.⁴³ While at St.

The basic legal test for insanity as a criminal plea comes in the aftermath of the trial of Daniel McNaughtan. In one way it resembles the Pound case: The prosecution pulled punches at the trial. He too was saved by the insanity plea. McNaughtan had killed Edward Drummond, the secretary to Prime Minister Robert Peel, and his trial in the Old Bailey had created a stir. But, like the Hinckley trial, the public stir of the trial was not nearly as great as, when McNaughtan was acquitted on grounds of insanity, the uproar which swept the country. Queen Victoria expressed her displeasure in a letter to Peel, suggesting that Parliament establish a rule on which judges would instruct juries. Both McNaughtan and Edward Oxford, who had shot at her three years earlier and also had been acquitted on grounds of insanity, were, as Queen Victoria saw it, “perfectly conscious and aware of what they did!”⁴⁵ The McNaughtan rule, written by the House of Lords, is the result. Its nucleus is that the jury should decide whether or not the accused “was laboring under such a defect of reason from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong.”⁴⁶ If the jury finds the accused was conscious that the act was one he/she ought not to do, the jury’s verdict can be guilty. Otherwise, if the test is met, the verdict should be not guilty by reason of insanity.

Daniel McNaughtan was a Glasgow wood turner actively involved in the Chartist movement during a time of severe economic depression. The Chartists had led various strikes, riots, factory sabotage, and work stoppages against the policies of Peel and the Tories which had kept prices high and wages low. The London Police, called Bobbies in honor of Peel, were at times mobilized against the Chartists. Glasgow was also a center for Chartism and police harassment. McNaughtan had intended to assassinate Peel in the summer of 1842 when Queen Victoria, Peel, and their entourage visited Scotland, but the opportunity did not present itself then.

McNaughtan traveled to London, where he was seen loitering around the government offices, especially near Downing Street. In the days before television and newspaper photographs, it is understandable how, in spite of careful stalking, McNaughtan mistook Peel’s private secretary, Edward Drummond, for Peel. On January 20, 1843, Drummond left the prime minister’s residence, made the rounds of the Treasury and Admiralty, and was walking near Charing Cross when McNaughtan came up from behind and shot him. Drummond died five days later. When the police officer at the station asked McNaughtan if he knew who it was he had shot, McNaughtan replied, “It is Sir Robert Peel, is it not?”⁴⁷

Richard Moran, in a careful investigation of McNaughtan’s life and crime, demonstrates that McNaughtan did not meet the test which carries his name. He was not insane, and, what is more, he attempted to assassinate Peel for political reasons. Both the expert and conventional wisdom about McNaughtan is that he was paranoid, imagining that Peel was persecuting him. Mistaking Drummond for Peel has been put down as part of his paranoia.

Moran found that at the time of his arrest McNaughtan was carrying a bank deposit receipt for £745. That is equivalent to a quarter of a million dollars today. Yet McNaughtan in the depressed economy had not done well in his Glasgow woodturning shop.

McNaughtan retained England’s finest lawyers, and they were able to procure the testimony of nine prominent medical experts and other witnesses, eight brought down from Glasgow. This defense effort was financed by the £750 in McNaughtan’s bank account. Alexander Cockburn, who presented the defense case, argued that while McNaughtan’s delusions that he was being persecuted by the Tories and the Jesuits had a political and religious bias, they were nevertheless delusions, “phantoms of a disordered mind.” The solicitor general, Sir William Follett, presented the case for the crown, concentrating on the deliberate preparations McNaughtan had made for his act, emphasizing the rational planning it involved. Moran, unlike either side at the trial, tracks McNaughtan through Glasgow and London, documenting the fact that Tory agents had been intimidating Chartists in Glasgow and that the priest of the only Catholic church in Glasgow, with McNaughtan’s shop less that a hundred yards away, harangued against Chartists and cooperated with the Tories against them. Given Moran’s findings, it is probable that McNaughtan was correct in his statement that the Tories were persecuting him. “It may well be,” Moran observes, “that the only real delusion McNaughtan ever suffered from was the delusion that he had shot the prime minister.”⁴⁹

Why did all of this not come out at the trial? Moran’s conclusion is that the McNaughtan trial “demonstrates how the insanity verdict can be used effectively to detain and discredit political offenders.

Additional reasons for believing McNaughtan’s claim that the Tories were after him can be found in the Lancaster trial of Feargus O’Connor and fifty-eight other Chartists. McNaughtan’s trial and the Lancaster trial coincided, both coming in the first days of March 1843. A measure of the importance attached to the two trials is that, while Solicitor General Follett represented the crown in Old Bailey, his superior, Attorney General Sir Frederick Pollock, made the long journey to the north to represent the crown in the O’Connor trial. McNaughtan was not mentioned in Lancaster. Feargus O’Connor, the Chartists, and McNaughtan’s involvement in the Chartist cause were not mentioned in Old Bailey. What the O’Connor trial does reveal clearly, however, is the extent and thoroughness of the informers who reported to the police on Chartist activities. The testimony introduced by Sir Frederick against O’Connor and the others detailed where they met, what they said to each other privately and in public, and what they did to advance the seditious conspiracy they were accused and, finally, convicted of in Lancaster. Unlike the prosecution in the McNaughtan trial, and contrary to Moran’s hypothesis that the crown did not want to reveal the extent of its spy network, Sir Frederick put the police spies on the witness stand and asked them to read their notes and to tell all they did, saw, and heard.⁵¹

Attorney General Pollock made it clear in his efforts to prosecute O’Connor and the others in Lancaster that the government wanted to discredit the Chartists. Why did the solicitor general in the McNaughtan trial avoid this even better opportunity? What could bring more dishonor to the Chartists than evidence that McNaughtan was a Chartist? An answer might lie in the difference between the two trials, especially in the nature of the accusation and the contrasting personalities of the accused.

O’Connor and the other Chartists were classic dissenters who opposed the government openly with writings in the Northern Star, with speeches, mass rallies, the demands of their charter, and strikes.⁵² They were charged with seditious conspiracy for inciting a work stoppage. Their trial could serve as a warning to other Chartists and could discredit the Chartist cause to the public as a violent movement led by irrational hotheads. Dissenters such as O’Connor, who operate in full public view to sway opinion, can be most easily discredited if they are portrayed as secret plotters intent on violence. Assassins, on the other hand, who might well be involved in plots and who always move in the shadows with violent intentions, will only be given a luster of respect if they are characterized as acting for political reasons. As we did with Oswald, Sirhan, and Ray, we prefer to believe that the assassin was a lone gunman, even better, a madman.

The groundwork was prepared, then, for Alexander Cockburn’s insanity defense of McNaughtan. Lacking the evidence that the prosecution chose not to follow, Cockburn could argue that while McNaughtan’s delusions that he was being persecuted by the Tories had a political bias, they were nevertheless delusions, “phantoms of a disordered mind,” which had been established at the 1800 trial of James Hadfield who shot at the king but was found not guilty by reason of insanity. If the crown had chosen to open the door to the Chartists’ activities McNaughtan had engaged in, seeking to convince the jury that McNaughtan was a paid assassin, Cockburn would have lost the case at the starting gate. But if such political matters were kept out, Cockburn would have only to place McNaughtan in the Hadfield framework. And he did.

After medical witnesses testified that McNaughtan was insane, Justice Tindal asked the prosecution whether the crown had any evidence in reply. When the solicitor general said he had none, Justice Tindal stopped the trial and told the jury that “the whole of the medical evidence is on one side, and that there is no part of it which leaves any doubt on the mind.”⁵³ The jury found McNaughtan “not guilty on the ground of insanity.”

McNaughtan spent the rest of his life, some twenty-one years, in mental hospitals. Feargus O’Connor and twenty-nine of the Chartists were found guilty of seditious conspiracy, but because of a legal technicality they were never called for judgment. O’Connor resumed his leadership of the Chartists, and in 1847 was elected to the House of Commons for Nottingham. Later in his life his mind gave way, and, like McNaughtan, he too ended his days in a mental hospital.

The 1881 trial of Charles Guiteau, who assassinated President Garfield, has been called the most celebrated American insanity trial of the nineteenth century. Guiteau, coincidentally like John Hinckley a century later, was an enthusiast of the news media. When Guiteau determined on his plan to assassinate President Garfield, he took care in selecting a pistol with an inlaid grip with a view to how it would look on display. On the morning of the assassination, July 2, 1881, Guiteau left a bundle of documents at the railroad station newsstand for the reporters in order to explain his act and provide them and the world with the proper biographical information. Among the papers was his “Address to the American People” in which he told why President Garfield was a traitor imperiling the life of the Republic under the manipulation of Secretary of State Blaine. He saw the need for “removing the President.” Earlier he had written to the Chicago papers with the suggestion that they would find use for information about him. He sent the editors his autobiography with the puff that “the story of my life is pointed and graphic, and reads like a romance, and tells of my acquaintance with public men, and of my attempted removal of the President.” He also included, for their further edification, a volume he wrote and published on his theology (The Truth: A Companion to the Bible). After the assassination, Guiteau, now in the limelight as a national figure, increased his own infatuation with his public image. Guiteau, for instance, asked a photographer to pay a $25 royalty for the use of his photograph, told the court during the trial that he was magnanimously not charging for his autograph, and expected that after his acquittal he would make some $30,000 a year on the lecture circuit. In letters to President Garfield following his election in 1880, Guiteau asked for an appointment to the United States mission in Vienna, recommending himself in part because he would soon be marrying a wealthy heiress, a wife suited to his station as a diplomat. In truth he had never met the woman he was convinced would marry him and assist in his diplomatic obligations, although he had seen her in church.⁵⁴

The trial of Charles Guiteau became a battle of psychiatrists. Fourteen experts for the prosecution argued that Guiteau understood the nature and consequences of his act, reasoned coherently, and showed no signs of a hereditary insanity. When asked what, if not heredity, had caused his act of assassinating the president, Dr. Allen Hamilton, a specialist in mental illness, responded, “intemperance, sin.” Guiteau objected to the use of the insanity defense, arguing that he had acted as God’s agent to “remove” the president for the good of the country. Under cross-examination by the prosecutor J. K. Porter, Guiteau was asked: “Who bought the pistol, the Deity or you?” Guiteau: “I say the Deity inspired the act, and the Deity will take care of it.” Porter: “Did it occur to you that there is a commandment, Thou shall not kill?” Guiteau: “If it did, the divine authority overcame the written law.” Porter asked him how he could be sure it was God rather than the Evil One who instructed him. Guiteau replied, “I claim that I am a man of destiny. I want to tell you and the public that I am a man of destiny.”⁵⁵

Another building block of the defense was that “there was a strong hereditary taint of insanity in the blood” of Guiteau. The two leading defense experts, both neurologists, Dr. James G. Kiernan of Chicago and Dr. Edward Spitzka of New York, held that they saw a congenital disposition toward a lack of moral perception and control. Dr. Kiernan maintained that he could spot physical stigmata: “the asymmetry of the skull being identified with the symmetry of the brain.” Spitzka concluded: “I am inclined strongly to believe and to affirm, as positively as science permits us to come to a conclusion, that it was a congenital moral defect.”⁵⁶ The jury, not convinced by the insanity defense, declared Guiteau guilty, and he was sent to the gallows.

Two recent cases have called public attention to the use of the insanity plea or provisions in the law for diminished responsibility. The reactions to both illustrate the hold which the common sense standards, such as Queen Victoria’s “perfectly conscious and aware” test, have on the public mind. In addition to the John Hinckley case, there is the reaction to the 1979 trial and light sentence of San Francisco supervisor Dan White and his 1984 release from prison. White was a 32-year-old army airborne veteran, a former policeman and, like his father, a fireman. On the board White was known for his hard line against legislation which would strengthen the rights of homosexuals. When he was elected he resigned his fireman’s job but soon found himself in financial difficulty. To help his budget he joined with a partner in a sideline, a fast food potato franchise at Pier 39. The Hot Potato proved to demand more of his time than he could give it, forcing him to resign his supervisor’s position. When he resigned he was met with pressure from his constituents, the policemen and firemen, to seek reappointment. After five days he gave in to the pressure and asked Mayor Moscone to reappoint him. Although the mayor told reporters that “a man has a right to change his mind” and seemed ready to reappoint White, liberals on the board, led by Supervisor Harvey Milk, pressured Moscone to appoint someone else. Moscone was planning a press conference to announce his decision when White received the news that Moscone was not planning to do what White thought he had promised. Several hours before the press conference White went to City Hall, crawled through a window to avoid the metal detectors at the door, went to Moscone’s office where he shot and killed him and, after reloading, went to Milk’s office where he shot and killed him also. He fled, first to phone his wife, and finally with his wife to the police station where, a half hour after the shootings, he surrendered to an old friend on the police force and, a half hour later, gave a detailed confession.⁵⁷

Prosecutor Thomas Norman presented the details of White’s movements, noting that he took ten additional cartridges when he left home with his police service revolver, that, as witnesses testified, he seemed “normal, friendly,” without a sense of urgency when he stepped into Supervisor Milk’s office saying, “Say, Harv, can I see you a minute?”⁵⁸ The prosecution demonstrated White had a design and was aware of his activities.

White’s defense attorney Douglas Schmidt, on the other hand, argued that White had “cracked” under financial and political pressures. “He had no intent at that time when he entered City Hall via a window to harm anyone, much less to kill the mayor or to kill Harvey Milk.… Dan White was a good man. He was a good policeman, he was a good fireman.… Good people—fine people with fine backgrounds simply don’t kill people in cold blood.” Psychiatrists for the defense testified that White suffered from manic depression or recurrent melancholia which affected his judgment, depriving him of the ability “to hold in mind” the intention to kill or the knowledge that it was wrong. The disease, the psychiatrists maintained, is partly “a biochemical problem in the brain” which can be aggravated by acute stress.

Dr. Martin Blinder, although he refused to make a pronouncement about whether White was mentally ill, made the observation that White’s frequent episodes of deep depression were escalated by an excessive diet of junk food. This was enough to give the entire defense the popular label, the “Twinkie defense.” Blinder’s testimony was that White “placed a lot of emotional chips” on his reappointment to the Board of Supervisors. “When the Mayor pulled the rug out from under him, he fell down.” Blinder characterized White as a person with rigid values which conflicted with his experiences in everyday life. He felt that the other board members “don’t give a damn” about constituents, only themselves, but until he resigned from the board “he never had any relief from these tensions.”⁵⁹

The jury, under a rule akin to the insanity plea allowing for a finding of “diminished capacity” to make judgments, found that the slayings were committed without malice and that White was guilty of voluntary manslaughter, instead of the first-degree murder with which he had been charged. Riots broke out, City Hall windows were smashed, fires were set, and some 140 people, including sixty police, were injured.⁶⁰

Dan White spent five years in California’s Soledad prison, was paroled in January 1984 amidst protests that his prison time was too short, and committed suicide in 1985.

The same criticisms were raised in the White case as in McNaughtan’s. The California voters in referendum removed the diminished capacity provision from the books, largely in reaction to the White verdict. The prosecution, as in the McNaughtan case, was criticized for pulling punches. They did not call to the witness stand a jailer who observed and was appalled by the chummy camaraderie Dan White had with the policemen, receiving something close to a hero’s reception when he surrendered. Contrary to the testimony about White “cracking up,” the jailer saw him as “perfunctory and businesslike, very controlled.” A member of the City Charter Commission and a former policeman agreed that a factor in the trial which the prosecution did not open up was the police attitude toward gays and liberals: “There was clearly some sort of a deal cut not to hit on the political aspects of this case. Everybody in town knew from the early defense subpoenas—for most every politician in town—that this was going to be a political trial. The defense was going to show the tensions—gays, liberals, the changes in town—that were offending Dan White’s sense of values.”⁶¹ Thomas Szasz, psychiatrist and gad-fly of his profession, charged that “according to the experts, there is no such thing as a political assassination in America. In America, only â€?mental patients’ kill political figures.”⁶²