APDL Eductation Resources/APDL Eductation Resources.iso/text/authors/marktwain/anewcrime/ANEWCRIME

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Internet Wiretap Edition of

A NEW CRIME by MARK TWAIN

From "Sketches New and Old", Copyright 1903, Samuel Clemens.
This text is placed in the Public Domain (Jun 1993, #18).


A NEW CRIME
LEGISLATION NEEDED

THIS country, during the last thirty or forty
years, has produced some of the most remark-
able cases of insanity of which there is any mention
in history. For instance, there was the Baldwin
case, in Ohio, twenty-two years ago. Baldwin, from
his boyhood up, had been of a vindictive, malignant,
quarrelsome nature. He put a boy's eye out once,
and never was heard upon any occasion to utter a
regret for it. He did many such things. But at
last he did something that was serious. He called
at a house just after dark one evening, knocked, and
when the occupant came to the door, shot him
dead, and then tried to escape, but was captured.
Two days before, he had wantonly insulted a help-
less cripple, and the man he afterward took swift
vengeance upon with an assassin bullet had knocked
him down. Such was the Baldwin case. The trial
was long and exciting; the community was fearfully
wrought up. Men said this spiteful, bad-hearted
villain had caused grief enough in his time, and now
he should satisfy the law. But they were mistaken;
Baldwin was INSANE when he did the deed -- they
had not thought of that. By the argument of
counsel it was shown that at half-past ten in the
morning on the day of the murder, Baldwin became
insane, and remained so for eleven hours and a half
exactly. This just covered the case comfortably,
and he was acquitted. Thus, if an unthinking and
excited community had been listened to instead of
the arguments of counsel, a poor crazy creature
would have been held to a fearful responsibility for
a mere freak of madness. Baldwin went clear, and
although his relatives and friends were naturally in-
censed against the community for their injurious
suspicions and remarks, they said let it go for this
time, and did not prosecute. The Baldwins were
very wealthy. This same Baldwin had momentary
fits of insanity twice afterward, and on both occa-
sions killed people he had grudges against. And on
both these occasions the circumstances of the killing
were so aggravated, and the murders so seemingly
heartless and treacherous, that if Baldwin had not
been insane he would have been hanged without the
shadow of a doubt. As it was, it required all his
political and family influence to get him clear in one
of the cases, and cost him not less than ten thousand
dollars to get clear in the other. One of these men
he had notoriously been threatening to kill for twelve
years. The poor creature happened, by the merest
piece of ill fortune, to come along a dark alley at
the very moment that Baldwin's insanity came upon
him, and so he was shot in the back with a gun
loaded with slugs.

Take the case of Lynch Hackett, of Pennsylvania.
Twice, in public, he attacked a German butcher by
the name of Bemis Feldner, with a cane, and both
times Feldner whipped him with his fists. Hackett
was a vain, wealthy, violent gentleman, who held
his blood and family in high esteem, and believed
that a reverent respect was due to his great riches.
He brooded over the shame of his chastisement for
two weeks, and then, in a momentary fit of insanity,
armed himself to the teeth, rode into town, waited a
couple of hours until he saw Feldner coming down
the street with his wife on his arm, and then, as the
couple passed the doorway in which he had partially
concealed himself, he drove a knife into Feldner's
neck, killing him instantly. The widow caught the
limp form and eased it to the earth. Both were
drenched with blood. Hackett jocosely remarked
to her that as a professional butcher's recent wife
she could appreciate the artistic neatness of the job
that left her in condition to marry again, in case she
wanted to. This remark, and another which he
made to a friend, that his position in society made
the killing of an obscure citizen simply an "eccen-
tricity" instead of a crime, were shown to be evi-
dences of insanity, and so Hackett escaped punish-
ment. The jury were hardly inclined to accept these
as proofs at first, inasmuch as the prisoner had never
been insane before the murder, and under the tran-
quilizing effect of the butchering had immediately
regained his right mind; but when the defense came
to show that a third cousin of Hackett's wife's step-
father was insane, and not only insane, but had a
nose the very counterpart of Hackett's, it was plain
that insanity was hereditary in the family, and
Hackett had come by it by legitimate inheritance.
Of course the jury then acquitted him. But it was
a merciful providence that Mrs. H.'s people had
been afflicted as shown, else Hackett would certainly
have been hanged.

However, it is not possible to recount all the mar-
velous cases of insanity that have come under the
public notice in the last thirty or forty years. There
was the Durgin case in New Jersey three years ago.
The servant girl, Bridget Durgin, at dead of night,
invaded her mistress' bedroom and carved the lady
literally to pieces with a knife. Then she dragged
the body to the middle of the floor, and beat and
banged it with chairs and such things. Next she
opened the feather beds, and strewed the contents
around, saturated everything with kerosene, and set
fire to the general wreck. She now took up the
young child of the murdered woman in her blood-
smeared hands and walked off, through the snow,
with no shoes on, to a neighbor's house a quarter
of a mile off, and told a string of wild, incoherent
stories about some men coming and setting fire to
the house; and then she cried piteously, and with-
out seeming to think there was anything suggestive
about the blood upon her hands, her clothing, and
the baby, volunteered the remark that she was
afraid those men had murdered her mistress! After-
ward, by her own confession and other testimony, it
was proved that the mistress had always been kind
to the girl, consequently there was no revenge in the
murder; and it was also shown that the girl took noth-
ing away from the burning house, not even her own
shoes, and consequently robbery was not the motive.
Now, the reader says, "Here comes that same old
plea of insanity again." But the reader has deceived
himself this time. No such plea was offered in her
defense. The judge sentenced her, nobody perse-
cuted the governor with petitions for her pardon,
and she was promptly hanged.

There was that youth in Pennsylvania, whose
curious confession was published some years ago.
It was simply a conglomeration of incoherent drivel
from beginning to end, and so was his lengthy
speech on the scaffold afterward. For a whole year
he was haunted with a desire to disfigure a certain
young woman, so that no one would marry her.
He did not love her himself, and did not want to
marry her, but he did not want anybody else to do
it. He would not go anywhere with her, and yet
was opposed to anybody else's escorting her. Upon
one occasion he declined to go to a wedding with
her, and when she got other company, lay in wait
for the couple by the road, intending to make them
go back or kill the escort. After spending sleepless
nights over his ruling desire for a full year, he at
last attempted its execution -- that is, attempted to
disfigure the young woman. It was a success. It
was permanent. In trying to shoot her cheek (as
she sat at the supper table with her parents and
brothers and sisters) in such a manner as to mar its
comeliness, one of his bullets wandered a little out
of the course, and she dropped dead. To the very
last moment of his life he bewailed the ill luck that
made her move her face just at the critical moment.
And so he died, apparently about half persuaded
that somehow it was chiefly her own fault that she
got killed. This idiot was hanged. The plea of
insanity was not offered.

Insanity certainly is on the increase in the world,
and crime is dying out. There are no longer any
murders -- none worth mentioning, at any rate.
Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that
you were insane -- but now, if you, having friends
and money, kill a man, it is EVIDENCE that you are a
lunatic. In these days, too, if a person of good
family and high social standing steals anything, they
call it KLEPTOMANIA, and send him to the lunatic
asylum. If a person of high standing squanders his
fortune in dissipation, and closes his career with
strychnine or a bullet, "Temporary Aberration" is
what was the trouble with HIM.

Is not this insanity plea becoming rather common?
Is it not so common that the reader confidently ex-
pects to see it offered in every criminal case that
comes before the courts? And is it not so cheap,
and so common, and often so trivial, that the reader
smiles in derision when the newspaper mentions it?
And is it not curious to note how very often it wins
acquittal for the prisoner? Of late years it does not
seem possible for a man to so conduct himself,
before killing another man, as not to be manifestly
insane. If he talks about the stars, he is insane. If
he appears nervous and uneasy an hour before the
killing, he is insane. If he weeps over a great grief,
his friends shake their heads, and fear that he is
"not right." If, an hour after the murder, he
seems ill at ease, preoccupied and excited, he is
unquestionably insane.

Really, what we want now, is not laws against
crime, but a law against INSANITY. There is where
the true evil lies.

END.