The Great Guiteau Trial: with life of the cowardly assassin : A full account! A complete history! The judge's charge to the jury. Speeches of counsel on both sides. Likenesses of all the parties concerned. Guiteau as a theologian, a politician, a tramp lawyer, a society beat, and as a member of the Oneida community.

Date:
[1882], [©1882]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Great Guiteau Trial: with life of the cowardly assassin : A full account! A complete history! The judge's charge to the jury. Speeches of counsel on both sides. Likenesses of all the parties concerned. Guiteau as a theologian, a politician, a tramp lawyer, a society beat, and as a member of the Oneida community. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    he is !iK-[Hretl by the Almighty to do «omethiug—to kill another for example —and this delusion might be so strong as to impel him to the commission of a crime. The defendant in this case claimed that he labored under such a delusion at the time of the assassination. His unsworn declarations in his own favor were not, of course, evidence, and were not to be considered by the jury. A man's language when sincere might be evidence of his condition of mind, but not evidence in his favor of the facts declared by him. He could never manufacture evidence in that way in his own exoneration. The law allowed a prisoner to testify in his own behalf, and therefore made his sworn testimony on the witness-sland legal evidence to be received and considered and given such weight to as it deserved. No ver- dict, however, could be safely rendered on the sole evidence of an accused party under such circumstances. Otherwise, a man on trial for his life could secure his acquittal by simply testifying that he had committed the crime under a delusion or inspiration, or irresistible impulse. That would be to proclaim a universal amnesty to criminals in the past and unbounded license in the future, and Courts of Justice might as well be closed. He would say a word about the characteristics of that form of delusion. The idea of being inspired to do an act might be either a sane belief or an in- sane delusion. A great many Christian people be- lieved not only that events were provi- dentially ordered, but that they them- selves received special providential guidance and illumination in respect to their inward thoughts and their out- ward actions. But this was a mere sane belief On the other hand, if a man sincerely though insanely believed that, like Paul on his way to Damascus, he had been smitten to the earth and had «eeu a great light and had heard a voice from Heaven warning and commanding him to do a certain act, that would be a case of imfi^'inary inspiration, amount- ing to an insane delusion. The question was whether the case of this defendant presented anything analogous to that. The theory of the Government was that the defendant committed this homi- cide in full possession of his faculties and from perfectly sane motives; that he did the act from revenge, or perhaps from a morbid desire for notoriety; that he calculated deliberately on being pro- tected by those who were to be benefited politically by the death of the Presi- dent ; that he made no pretence of in- spiration at the time of the assassina- tion, nor until he had discovered that his expectations from the so-called Stalwart wing of the Republican party were de- lusive and that then for the first time he broached this theory of inspiration and irresistible pressure to -the commis- sion of the act. Whether this was true or not the jury must determine from the evidence. It was true that the terra inspiration did not appear in the papers first written by the defendant nor in those, delivered to Mr. Reynolds, ex- cept at the close of the one dated July 19th, in which he said that the inspira- tion was worked out of him (although what that meant was not clear), and it was true also that that was after he was informed that he was being denounced by the Stalwarts. In this connection Judge Cox referred to the testimony of Dr. Noble Young,. Dr. MacDonald and Dr. Gray, and this, he said, was about the substance of what was in the case on the subject of inspira- tion. The prisoner—Allow me to say that statement by Dr. Gray is incomplete. Judge Cox went on to say that the question for the jury was whether on the one hand the idea of killing the Presi- dent first presented itself to the defend- ant in the shape of a command or in- spiration of the Deity, in the manner in which insane delusions of that sort arose, or whether, on the other hand, it was a conception of his own, and whether the thought of inspiration was not simply a speculative or theoretical conclusion oi his own mind. If it were the latter, ir was nothing more than one of the vaga- ries of reasoning which he had already characterized as furnishing no excuse for crime. He had dwelt upon the question of insane delusion simply be- cause the evidence relating to that was evidence touching the defendant's power or want of power (from mental disease) to distinguish between right and wrong as to the act done by him. This was the broad question for the jury to determine