Destiny of the Republic (32 page)

Lucretia tried to feel some Christian sympathy for Guiteau, and she urged her children to do the same. Her daughter, however, found it almost impossible. “Mama says he ought to be pitied—Pitied!” Mollie wrote. “I suppose Mama darling is right. But I can not feel that way.” Mollie, who had watched her father die a long and agonizing death, wished for nothing more than a tortured end for his assassin. “I suppose I am wicked but these are my feelings,” she confessed in her diary. “Guiteau ought to be made to suffer as much and a thousand times more than Papa did.… Nothing is to[o] horrible for him, & I hope that everything that can be done to injure him, will be done.”

One of the few voices of calm and reason was that of General William Tecumseh Sherman, who had organized the troops now protecting Guiteau. His request for restraint, however, was couched in terms that made it clear that he fully understood how difficult it was to wait for justice. “For this man Guiteau I ask no soldier, no citizen, to feel one particle of sympathy,” he wrote in an open letter that was printed in papers across the country. “On the contrary, could I make my will the law, shooting or hanging would be too good for him. But I do ask every soldier and citizen to remember that we profess to be the most loyal Nation on earth to the sacred promises of the law. There is no merit in obeying an agreeable law, but there are glory and heroism in submitting gracefully to an oppressive one.”

Now that Garfield was dead, Americans’ greatest fear was that Guiteau would get away with murder—not because he was innocent, but because he was insane. The insanity defense was already widely known and almost uniformly despised. Even Garfield, ten years before his own murder, had expressed deep skepticism about the plea. “All a man would need to secure immunity from murder would be to tear his hair and rave a little,” he had written, “and then kill his man.”

The legal standard for determining insanity—known as the M’Naghten Rule—had been established nearly forty years earlier, across the sea. The rule was named for Daniel M’Naghten, a Scottish woodworker who, believing that he was the target of a conspiracy between the pope and the British prime minister Robert Peel, had attempted to assassinate Peel. Instead, he had shot and mortally wounded Peel’s private secretary, Edward Drummond. M’Naghten’s lawyers had successfully argued that he was insane, and so not responsible for his actions. M’Naghten would live another twenty-two years, finally dying in an insane asylum in 1865, from “gradual failure of heart’s action.”

The verdict had sparked immediate outrage in England, and awakened bitter memories of the trial of Edward Oxford just three years earlier. Oxford, who had attempted to shoot Queen Victoria while she was riding in a carriage, pregnant with her first child, had also been found not guilty by reason of insanity. “We have seen the trials of Oxford and MacNaughtan [spelling variation] conducted by the ablest lawyers of the day,” Queen Victoria had written in disgust to Peel after the M’Naghten ruling, “and they allow and advise the Jury to pronounce the verdict of Not Guilty on account of Insanity,—whilst everybody is morally convinced that both malefactors were perfectly conscious and aware of what they did!” Before her eventual death in 1901, at the age of eighty-one, Queen Victoria would survive several more assassination attempts. Her husband, who had lived to witness four of them, was convinced that the would-be assassins had been encouraged by Oxford’s acquittal.

The House of Lords, in agreement with the queen, decided that the country needed a clear, strict definition of criminal insanity. Less than four months after M’Naghten’s trial, the judges of the British Supreme Court ruled that, in essence, the difference between a sane man and one who was insane lay in the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. A defendant, they declared, could use the insanity defense only if, “at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from a 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 he was doing what was wrong.”

The M’Naghten Rule, while quickly adopted in the United States as well as in England, did little to improve the reputation of the insanity defense. In America, it became known as the “insanity dodge,” the refuge not of the mad but of the guilty. Celebrity cases only made matters worse. In 1859, Congressman Daniel Edgar Sickles was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity after shooting to death Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Thirteen years later, Edward Stokes, the man who murdered James Fisk, Jay Gould’s partner, used the same defense and spent only four years in prison.

It came as no surprise, therefore, when, on October 14, Garfield’s assassin submitted his plea to Judge Walter Cox. “I plead not guilty to the indictment,” Guiteau stated, in a plea that he had drafted himself. His first and primary defense was “Insanity, in that it was God’s act and not mine. The Divine pressure on me to remove the president was so enormous that it destroyed my free agency, and therefore I am not legally responsible for my act.” Although Guiteau laid blame for the shooting squarely on God’s shoulders, he made it clear that his faith in divine intervention—at least when his own life was at stake—remained unshaken. “I have entire confidence in His disposition to protect me,” he wrote in the plea, “and to send me forth to the world a free and innocent man.”

Guiteau would follow the lead of M’Naghten, Oxford, Sickles, and Stokes, and attempt to use his insanity to save his life. Legally, he was allowed this argument, and there was nothing anyone could do to prevent it. It was clear to all involved in the case, however, that the American people would accept no verdict but guilty, no sentence but death. “Guiteau should have a fair trial. Everything that can be urged in his behalf should be patiently heard. It is the right of the meanest thing that bears a human form,” one editorial argued. “But such a trial, such a hearing, in a community of intelligent beings can have but one result.”

The case of the
United States v. Charles J. Guiteau
began on the morning of November 14, less than two months after Garfield’s death. Guiteau’s attorney was his brother-in-law, George Scoville, who had come to his rescue countless times in the past with a place to live and loans to keep him alive and out of prison. Scoville was a patent lawyer, and knew almost nothing about the criminal justice system, but he was one of the few lawyers in the country willing to represent the president’s assassin. Even Scoville admitted, “If I didn’t think the unfortunate man was insane, I would not defend him at all.”

As difficult as it was to find a competent defense attorney, it had been nearly impossible to assemble a dispassionate jury. When asked if he would be able to render an impartial verdict in the trial of Guiteau, one prospective juror had replied, “I think he ought to be hung or burnt or something else.… I don’t think there is any evidence in the United States to convince me any other way.” It took three days of jury selection and 175 men to find 12 jurors. In the end, however, Guiteau faced a jury that was, if not unbiased, at least diverse. Deciding his fate were a machinist, two grocers, three merchants, an iron worker, a retired businessman, a restaurant manager, a cigar dealer, and two plasterers. Eleven of the men were white, and one was black.

Before the trial began at 10:00 a.m., a crush of people gathered outside the courtroom, clutching tickets and staring at the closed doors. Deputy marshals wearing bright red badges surrounded the throng, checking the authenticity of their tickets and examining media passes, which, “for the first time in anyone’s memory,” journalists were required to carry.

The courtroom itself had been renovated just for the trial. A temporary floor had been installed, and more seating added. Half the seats were reserved for lawyers, distinguished guests—a group that included even Frederick Douglass—and journalists. The rest were first come, first served. Those fortunate enough to find seats were so worried that they would lose them during the noon recess that they carried picnic baskets when they arrived in the morning, and had their lunch on their laps.

Guiteau had planned to make an opening statement that day, but the judge refused to allow it. Frustrated, he turned to the long row of reporters seated behind him and handed them his statement. It was not a defense of his actions, or even an argument for insanity, but an indictment of the men who were, he argued, the president’s true murderers—his doctors.

The situation, Guiteau insisted, was perfectly clear. “General Garfield died from malpractice,” he wrote. “According to his own physicians, he was not fatally shot. The doctors who mistreated him ought to bear the odium of his death, and not his assailant. They ought to be indicted for murdering James A. Garfield, and not me.” A few days later, Guiteau would himself announce his argument to the courtroom, interrupting a witness who was describing the scene at the train station when Garfield was shot. “I deny the killing, if your honor please,” he said. “We admit the shooting.”

Day after day, as the trial slowly advanced, Guiteau repeatedly tried to insert himself into the proceedings. Often, his outbursts were harsh, humiliating critiques of his brother-in-law’s legal skill. “Now, don’t spoil the matter on cross-examination,” he shouted at Scoville at one point. “That is the way you generally do. You spoil everything by cross-examination.… You are a jackass on the question of cross-examination. I must tell you that right in public, to your face.”

When he wasn’t attacking his own attorney, Guiteau attempted to question witnesses, refute testimony, address the judge directly, and even make public appeals for legal and financial assistance. After learning that a fund had been established for Lucretia and her children, he made an announcement to the courtroom. “The rich men of New York gave Mrs. Garfield $200,000 or $300,000,” he said. “It was a splendid thing—a noble thing. Now, I want them to give me some money.”

Finally, Scoville himself asked the court to force his client to keep quiet. Judge Cox, determined that there not be any possible grounds for appeal, was reluctant to remove Guiteau from the courtroom. There was little he could do, therefore, beyond issuing repeated warnings and moving the defendant farther from the witness stand. Guiteau’s “declarations,” the judge would later complain, “could not have been prevented except by resorting to the process of gagging him.”

The more Guiteau spoke, the more apparent his insanity became. He was highly intelligent and surprisingly articulate, but his mind did not work like that of a sane man. “All the links in the chain are there,” George Beard, a psychiatrist who would interview Guiteau on four separate occasions, explained, “but they are not joined, but rather tossed about hither and thither, singly, like quoits, each one good and strong of itself, but without relation to any other.” When Guiteau speaks, Beard said, “his insanity forces itself constantly to the front, breaking in upon his eloquence.”

Guiteau spent nearly a week on the stand, talking about his childhood, his years at the commune, his life as a traveling evangelist, and his motivations for shooting the president. The prosecution did everything in its power to prove that he was not insane, but simply immoral. Scoville countered by tracing the history of insanity in Guiteau’s family—from an uncle who had died in an asylum to several aunts, cousins, and even Guiteau’s own mother.

Before the trial had ended, thirty-six experts would testify on the subject of Guiteau’s sanity. Scoville placed most of his hope in a controversial but widely admired young neurologist named Edward Spitzka, who had studied in Vienna and Leipzig and was well known for openly questioning, even attacking, the most powerful psychiatrists in the nation. Even before meeting Guiteau, Spitzka had written in a medical journal that, if the defendant, “with his hereditary history, his insane manner, his insane documents and his insane actions were to be committed to any asylum in the land, he would be unhesitatingly admitted as a proper subject for sequestration.” In the courtroom, after Spitzka testified that he had examined Guiteau and found him to be insane, Scoville asked, “Did you have any question on that subject?” Without hesitating, Spitzka replied, “Not the slightest.”