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Capital Punishment and the Insane

In both English and U.S. history, it has been consistently argued that using capital punishment (execution) against someone who has been found insane is both “savage and inhuman;” and in 1986 the Supreme Court affirmed that belief by outlawing it. The belief is that someone can’t be responsible for his or her actions if that person doesn’t have control of himself or herself. This issue became important in what would become one of the most forgotten assassinations in U.S. history.

A man by the name of Charles Guiteau had campaigned for upcoming President James Garfield and, after the president’s election, tried to get a job under him. The problem was that he was completely unqualified for the job he wanted (a job with the U.S. Consulate in Paris). Having harassed the president’s secretaries for this position, Guiteau became such an annoyance to them that he was eventually banned from the White House. Guiteau seems to have taken this personally, and he blamed the president.

So, on July 2, 1881, while the president was walking through the waiting room of the Baltimore and Potomac train station in Washington, D.C., Guiteau approached from behind and, with revolver in hand, fired two shots. The first was a miss, grazing the president’s arm; but the second lodged into Garfield’s back, although not in a place that would have killed him. It was only later, after doctors inspected [burrowed inside] the wound with unwashed hands, did the president’s situation become more serious. Having contracted blood poisoning, and after only eighty days in office, President Garfield died.

At this point in the story, anyone would say Guiteau was certainly responsible for the president’s death, but what came next made that a little less clear. Part of Guiteau’s resulting trial focused on whether or not he was insane (he claimed God told him to kill the president; and during the trial had to be physically restrained and told to “shut his mouth” for his continuous outbursts). A doctor familiar with the insane was called as a witness and, during testimony, said he had been “probably insane” when he’d fired the two shots at the president. Because of his previous testimony claiming he was not insane, however, Guiteau was condemned. Being sentenced, he was hanged just under a year later (June 30, 1882).

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