Fiend (28 page)

Even so, Train forced the witness to admit that “the mere evidence presented at the trial was not, in itself, sufficient to establish
insanity.” Walker also conceded that “the fact that the boy ran away after committing the acts, so as to escape punishment, was clear evidence of his power to distinguish between right and wrong, and established that he was fully conscious of his responsibility.”

With the conclusion of Dr. Walker’s testimony, the defense rested its case. The time was a little before 5:00
P.M.
The jurors were allowed a five-minute recess, after which the government’s rebuttal witness, Dr. George T. Choate, was sworn in.

A self-described “expert in insanity,” Dr. Choate had served as superintendent of the State Lunatic Asylum in Taunton for seventeen years before establishing a private sanitarium about thirty miles north of New York City, on the Hudson River. In the course of his career, he had treated hundreds of patients, among them the renowned journalist and statesman, Horace Greeley.

He began by explaining that he had interviewed Jesse twice in October. During his first visit, Jesse had freely confessed to the Millen murder and demonstrated at least a modicum of remorse, “acknowledging that what he’d done was wrong.” Choate had been struck by the boy’s “intelligence and shrewdness.” Evidently, Jesse had been spending his time in jail “investigating the legal aspects of his case.” With cool, even cocky, self-assurance, Jesse had stated “that the authorities will never hang me, as I am too young. They have never hung a boy as young as fourteen in Massachusetts, and I do not believe they will begin with me.” Instead, he expected to be sentenced to either the state prison or a lunatic asylum—though he firmly believed that “if he could be sent away to sea, he would get over his desire to commit cruelties.” When Choate had remarked that “it would be difficult for you to get a chance, since a captain might have fears that you would kill him in the night,” Jesse had replied: “I have no desire to injure men. Only boys.”

Choate was taken aback when—at the start of their second interview a few days later—Jesse completely retracted his confession, claiming that he had only admitted to the murder to clear his mother and brother from suspicion. In Choate’s view, this was further evidence of Jesse’s cunning, deeply manipulative mind. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Choate’s ultimate diagnosis completely contradicted the opinion of the two defense experts. In his view, Jesse was not suffering from a mental disease. “There is
no insane temperament or taint of hereditary insanity in the boy,” he testified. To be sure, Pomeroy’s mind was “different”—but it was different in its
“moral
qualities, in its proneness to certain forms of sin and its weakness in resisting those impulses.” Jesse had “a weak character—not a weak intellect.” In short, it was Dr. Choate’s conviction that on April 22, 1874, the day of Horace Millen’s murder, Jesse Pomeroy was not insane.

Robinson cross-examined Choate at some length, but the alienist didn’t waver from his opinion that Pomeroy—though possessed of a “weak moral nature”—was “not
mentally
unsound.” It was nearly six when his testimony ended. There were no further witnesses to be heard on either side. Having begun only the day before, the trial of the Boston “boy fiend” was already drawing to an end.

A few minutes after Choate left the stand, court was adjourned for the day. Beginning at nine o’clock on Thursday morning, the jury would listen to the final arguments before retiring to deliberate on Jesse Pomeroy’s fate.

32

Any person [who] shall commit the Crime of Willful Murder . . . who, in the Supreme Judicial Court, shall be duly convicted . . . shall suffer the punishment of death.

—Declaration of the Massachusetts State Legislature, 1804

T
o more than one observer, the scene inside the courtroom on Thursday morning resembled a packed downtown theater during the sold-out performance of a hit show. “Not only every seat,” reported the
Boston Herald,
“but every inch of standing room was occupied as well.” The crowd had clearly flocked to the final session of the trial in the hope of seeing something dramatic—and they were not disappointed. For in the closing arguments of the opposing attorneys, the audience was treated to a pair of speeches that were (according to one journalist) “masterpieces of legal acumen,” containing “many brilliant passages,” as well as “wonderfully ingenious pleas and interpretations of evidence.”

Jesse’s lawyer, Charles Robinson, spoke first. Addressing the jury in sonorous tones, he began by recapping the salient points of Pomeroy’s life—his childhood illnesses, his mental idiosyncrasies, his perverse nature, his “love of blood and cruelty.” “All the evidence introduced during the trial,” he declared, “clearly establishes the fact that at the time the homicidal act was committed, the accused was not responsible, for the reason that his mind was diseased.”

In a voice tinged with incredulity, he asked: “Could a boy of fourteen be in his senses and drag away a bright little child, the delight of his home and the hope of his fond parents, and—without any motive or provocation and with premeditated malice aforethought—cut, mangle, and murder him in cold blood?”

Shaking his head “no,” as though in answer to his own question,
he urged the jury to find a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. “I am asking it not for the prisoner,” Robinson said, “but in the name of humanity and justice.” He stressed that, in reaching such a decision, the jurors would not be setting Pomeroy free. “I would not for a moment ask that such a being be let loose upon society.” The law had sound provisions for dealing with “deranged” individuals like the prisoner. Pomeroy would be sent to an insane asylum, where he would be “taken care of with as great a security to himself and the public as if he was sent to another world.” He would never again “be able to do harm to innocent children.”

Robinson also cautioned the jury against convicting Jesse as a form of deterrent—as a way of sending a warning to other potential killers. “No crime,” he proclaimed, “will be deterred by the punishment of an irresponsible person.”

Gesturing toward the prosecution table where his opposite number sat, Robinson observed that the attorney general would undoubtedly attempt to portray Jesse as a monster. But the boy was “not a monster born under barbarous influences,” Robinson declared. He was “a product of Massachusetts—an outgrowth of her civilization for the last fourteen years, a pupil of her schools, a son of one of her citizens.” It was plain that he was “not naturally wicked. Neither was he so from example, but rather from an unfortunate disease of the mind which rendered him irresponsible.

“It was not the boy alone who was on trial,” said Robinson. “The intelligence, the humanity, the Christian principles of the Commonwealth were also on the stand.” With the jury lay the power of decision, and their “verdict would be the verdict of Massachusetts.”

After pausing for a moment, as though to let the full import and gravity of his words sink in, Robinson continued by repeating that the “lack of any motive to impel the boy to commit his acts of atrocity” was the “pivot upon which the whole argument of insanity hinged.” Briefly reviewing the psychiatric testimony, he argued that the jurors were duty-bound to give particular weight to the opinions of the defense experts, Drs. Tyler and Walker. “When these learned physicians, who have had a quarter-of-a-century’s experience with all classes of insanity, come before a court of the Commonwealth and—after a careful study and frequent examinations—swear that it is their opinion that the boy was insane at the
time of the murder, the presumption is that they are right.” That opinion, moreover, was bolstered “by the long chain of evidence presented at the trial.”

By contrast, said Robinson, the testimony of the government’s expert could not be accepted at face value. Though Dr. Choate “was doubtless an honest and a learned man,” he could not, under the circumstances, be regarded as a strictly objective one. After all, Robinson insisted, Dr. Choate “had been brought from New York by the attorney general precisely because it was expected that he would look upon the case in the same way as the prosecutors.”

Robinson’s tone became increasingly fervent as he reached the end of his speech. “The whole history of criminal trials in Massachusetts,” he declared, “did not show a case like this.” It was “a mountain rising higher than any other crime.” Faced with such a momentous decision, the jurors had a sacred obligation “to weigh very carefully the question of the boy’s sanity.”

Robinson closed with a powerful appeal “for a kindly feeling towards the unfortunate boy, whose mind was impelled to evil by an unseen and inexplicable power.” In a voice full of emotion, he urged the jurors to arrive at a verdict “consistent with religion, law, justice, and the highest humanity.” So affecting were his final words that, as he returned to his seat, a chorus of sniffles broke out in the courtroom, and a number of women—including Jesse’s mother—raised handkerchiefs to their faces to dab away the tears that Robinson’s peroration had brought to their eyes.

*  *  *

Moments later, at approximately 12: 45
P.M.
, Attorney General Train began his address to the jury. Alluding to Robinson’s concluding remarks, Train asserted that the Commonwealth, every bit as much as the defense, “wished for a verdict consistent with humanity and justice.” But what precisely did justice
mean?

“It means,” he asserted, “that the Commonwealth shall make laws for the government of society, and that the individual shall be beholden to those laws. This is the method by which society seeks to protect itself.” All members of society, young and old, boy and girl, are “amenable to its rules.” The defendant was no different in this regard from anyone else.

Of course, said Train, it was only natural that the lawyers for the defendant “should appeal to the juror’s sympathies.” But he emphatically denied the suggestion that the state was somehow
un
sympathetic—that it was actuated by motives of “malice or revenge.” On the contrary, the prosecution had gone to considerable lengths to make certain that the defendant received the fairest trial possible. Though the attorney general “could have tried the case within sixty days of the issuing of the indictment,” he had held off the trial for
six months
in order to give Jesse’s lawyers every opportunity to mount the strongest possible defense.

Turning to the crux of the case, Train, like Robinson, declared that “the question to be resolved was the responsibility of the person who committed the homicide.” The law was very clear in stating “that murder committed with premeditated malice aforethought shall be considered the highest degree of murder.” This law, Train repeated, “applies to all members of society.” No one was exempt from it—not even a fourteen-year-old boy.

Put in the simplest terms, “the boy was either sane, or he was a lunatic.” And the testimony set forth at the trial led to only one possible conclusion. The state had shown beyond any doubt that—though possessed “of a heart devoid of social duty and wickedly defiant of any restraints”—Jesse Pomeroy was
not
insane. The murder of the little Millen boy was not only “premeditated but committed with atrocity and cruelty.”

Train did not claim the boy’s acts “weren’t extraordinary—for they
were.
But they are accounted for on the ground of
depravity,
not insanity—and society has a right to protect itself from such acts.” It was for this reason, Train said gravely, that he must “demand a verdict of murder in the first degree.”

Proceeding to review the facts of Jesse’s life, Train argued that there was nothing about the defendant’s behavior that was different from that of many other young boys. It was not unusual for children to suffer from headaches, or to make funny faces at their classmates. Nor was there anything remarkable about his “doing wrong and then saying he did not know why he’d done it.”

Even the story of his maltreatment of the kitten proved nothing, given the casual cruelties that so many little boys inflict on small creatures—pulling the wings off flies and so forth. If the story proved anything, Train quipped, it showed that Jesse did not suffer from epilepsy but rather from
cat
alepsy. The attorney general’s little pun drew appreciative chuckles from several of the jurors. Even Jesse broke into a big grin and, turning to his lawyer, said: “That’s a good one.”

Resuming his most solemn mien, Train went on to remind the jurors that Jesse’s own mother had testified to her son’s intellectual capacities. In reform school, he had been regarded “not only as a good but a remarkably good boy.” Did the jury really believe, asked Train, “that the officers of the reform school would turn out an insane maniac of fourteen into the community of South Boston? No! It is a well-known fact that the trustees believed that they were releasing a sane man upon society.”

But the most compelling proof of Jesse’s sanity was the very fiendishness of his crimes. “Every circumstance connected with the torture of the little boys showed sanity and reasoning.” The fact, for example, “that he had taken a little boy, a boy smaller than he was, to Powder Horn Hill, brought a rope with him, took the boy to a retired place, put a handkerchief in his mouth, and so on”—all these things indicated that the defendant “had reason and reasoned very clearly.” Indeed, far from being signs of insanity, they served to prove that Jesse Pomeroy possessed “mental capacities of more than ordinary force.”