Insanity

Insanity
Author: Charles Patrick Ewing
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2008-04-07
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0198043694

The insanity defense is one of the oldest fixtures of the Anglo-American legal tradition. Though it is available to people charged with virtually any crime, and is often employed without controversy, homicide defendants who raise the insanity defense are often viewed by the public and even the legal system as trying to get away with murder. Often it seems that legal result of an insanity defense is unpredictable, and is determined not by the defendants mental state, but by their lawyers and psychologists influence. From the thousands of murder cases in which defendants have claimed insanity, Doctor Ewing has chosen ten of the most influential and widely varied. Some were successful in their insanity plea, while others were rejected. Some of the defendants remain household names years after the fact, like Jack Ruby, while others were never nationally publicized. Regardless of the circumstances, each case considered here was extremely controversial, hotly contested, and relied heavily on lengthy testimony by expert psychologists and psychiatrists. Several of them played a major role in shaping the criminal justice system as we know it today. In this book, Ewing skillfully conveys the psychological and legal drama of each case, while providing important and fresh professional insights. For the legal or psychological professional, as well as the interested reader, Insanity will take you into the minds of some of the most incomprehensible murderers of our age.

Murder, Magic, Madness

Murder, Magic, Madness
Author: Davies Owen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2014-05-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317867556

In 1856 William Dove, a young tenant farmer, was tried and executed for the poisoning of his wife Harriet. The trial might have been a straightforward case of homicide, but because Dove became involved with Henry Harrison, a Leeds wizard, and demonstrated through his actions and words a strong belief in magic and the powers of the devil, considerable effort was made to establish whether these beliefs were symptomatic of insanity. It seems that Dove murdered his wife to hasten a prediction made by Harrison that he would remarry a more attractive and wealthy woman. Dove employed Harrison to perform various acts of magic, and also made his own written pact with the devil to improve his personal circumstances. The book will study Dove’s beliefs and Harrison’s activities within the rural and urban communities in which they lived, and examine how modern cultures attempted to explain this largely hidden mental world, which was so sensationally exposed. The Victorian period is often portrayed as an age of great social and educational progress. This book shows how beliefs dismissed by some Victorians as ‘medieval superstitions’ continued to influence the thoughts and actions of many people, viz most famously Conan `table tapper' Doyle.

Of Murder and Madness

Of Murder and Madness
Author: Gerry Spence
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Total Pages: 488
Release: 1983
Genre: Law
ISBN:

A KILLER WITHOUT REDEMPTION... In broad daylight in the backwater of Rawlins, Wyoming, Joe Esquibel shot his wife right between the eyes in front of eight witnesses, including his own children and a deputy sheriff with his gun drawn. It seemed an indefensible case of premeditated murder by a remorseless killer. A crime that cried out for the death penalty. A LAWYER WHO WOULDN'T GIVE UP... Enter Gerry Spence, the controversial, nationally renowned defense lawyer who'd never lost a case. Undeterred by the odds against him, and armed with awesome powers of persuasion, he turned the trial into an electrifying legal battle to save a man from execution. For seven years, through three trials, he fought with everything he had, until, incredibly, he achieved the impossible: Esquibel was acquitted by reason of insanity. OF MURDER AND MADNESS... With riveting detail, Gerry Spence takes you behind the scenes of an unforgettable true-life courtroom drama-- and inside the mind of a murderer. It is a fascinating, unvarnished look at the wheelings and dealings that go on in the courtroom...and a chilling odyssey into the darkness of the human soul.

Furious Hours

Furious Hours
Author: Casey Cep
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 110194787X

This “superbly written true-crime story” (Michael Lewis, The New York Times Book Review) masterfully brings together the tales of a serial killer in 1970s Alabama and of Harper Lee, the beloved author of To Kill a Mockingbird, who tried to write his story. Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members, but with the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative assassinated him at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell’s murderer was acquitted—thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the reverend himself. Sitting in the audience during the vigilante’s trial was Harper Lee, who spent a year in town reporting on the Maxwell case and many more trying to finish the book she called The Reverend. Cep brings this remarkable story to life, from the horrifying murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South, while offering a deeply moving portrait of one of our most revered writers.

Murder on Trial

Murder on Trial
Author: Robert Asher
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2005-03-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780791463789

A historical romp through the fascinating subject of murder jurisprudence in the United States from the colonial period to the present, showing how changing social mores have influenced the application of murder law.

Love and Madness

Love and Madness
Author: Martin Levy
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2004-12-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0060559756

On a spring evening in 1779, as she emerged from London's Covent Garden Theatre, a beautiful young woman was shot in the head at point-blank range by a man in a black suit. The brutal murder was even more shocking because of the victim's identity -- she was Martha Ray, live-in mistress to the Earl of Sandwich and devotee of the arts. The man accused of her murder was none other than James Hackman, a respected Anglican minister and Ray's former lover. The aftermath of the crime created an uproar in London high society, as aristocrats debated Hackman's motives. Had he intended to commit suicide, as he later claimed, but, in a moment of weakness, turned his gun on Ray instead? This riveting tale of a crime of passion re-creates the slaying and the clergyman's trial, which was the unrivaled media sensation of its time.

Trials of Passion

Trials of Passion
Author: Lisa Appignanesi
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2015-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1605988154

A journey into the heart of dark passions and the crimes they impel. When passion is in the picture, what is criminal, what is sane, what is mad or simply bad? Through court and asylum records, letters and newspaper accounts, this book brings to life some sensational trials between 1870 and 1914, a period when the psychiatric professions were consolidating their hold on our understanding of what is human. Outside fiction, individual emotions and the inner life had rarely been publicly discussed: now, in an increasingly popular press and its courtroom reports, people avidly consumed accounts of transgressive sexuality, savage jealousy and forbidden desires. These stood revealed as aspects not only of those labelled mad, but potentially, of everyone. With great story-telling flair and a wealth of historical detail, Lisa Appignanesi teases out the vagaries of passion and the clashes between the law and the clinic as they stumble towards a (sometimes reviled) collaboration. Sexual etiquette and class roles, attitudes to love, madness and gender, notions of respectability and honor, insanity and lunacy, all are at play in that vital forum in which public opinion is shaped—the theater of the courtroom.

Murder and Madness on Trial

Murder and Madness on Trial
Author: Mònica Calabritto
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2023-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0271095997

On October 24, 1588, Paolo Barbieri murdered his wife, Isabella Caccianemici, stabbing her to death with his sword. Later, Paolo would claim to have acted in a fit of madness—but was he criminally insane or merely pretending to be? In this riveting book, Mònica Calabritto addresses this controversy by reconstructing Paolo’s life, prosecution, and medical diagnoses. Skillfully combining archival documents unearthed throughout Italy, Calabritto brings to light the case of one person and his family as insanity ravaged their financial security, honor, and reputation. The very notion of insanity is as much on trial in Paolo’s case as the defendant himself. A case study in the diagnosis of insanity in the early modern era, Barbieri’s story reveals discrepancies between medical and legal definitions of a person’s mental state at the time of a crime. Murder and Madness on Trial bridges the micro-historical dimensions of Paolo’s murder case and the macro-historical perspectives on medical and legal evidence used to identify intermittent madness. A tragic and gripping tale, Murder and Madness on Trial allows readers to look “through a glass darkly” at early modern violence, madness, criminal justice, medical and legal expertise, and the construction and circulation of news. This erudite and engaging book will appeal to early modern historians and true crime fans alike.

Seduced by Madness

Seduced by Madness
Author: Carol Pogash
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2009-10-13
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0061751200

A true crime account and analysis of a California housewife’s murder of her husband and the revealing trial that followed. In October 2002, Susan Polk, the soft-spoken mother of three teenage boys, was arrested for stabbing her husband and former therapist, Dr. Felix Polk, to death. Three years later she was tried for first degree murder, choosing to act as her own attorney in a trial that rapidly devolved into one of the most outrageous media circuses in modern history. To a crowded courtroom, Susan Polk presented her defense—a bizarre story of unethical therapies, abuse, repressed memories, and satanic rituals—and, in doing so, exposed her madness. Carol Pogash was there. Seduced by Madness is the remarkably compelling, profoundly disturbing true story of the severe dysfunction of an affluent American family, as told by the leading journalist who worked the case. It is a spellbinding re-creation of a troubled life, a marriage, a murder, and a terrifying, inexorable descent into madness. Praise for Seduced by Madness “While the background is fascinating, the coverage of the trial is mesmerizing. Pogash takes the characters . . . and creates an edge-of-your-seat excitement. For fans of true crime, psychology, courtroom drama and truth-is-stranger-than fiction, this is a triumph.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

One Night of Madness

One Night of Madness
Author: Stokes McMillan
Publisher: Stokes McMillan
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2009-11-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0982529104

The year was 1950. Mary Ella Harris, works hard sharecropping alongside her husband, a man with a penchant for gambling, drinking, and associating with unsavory white people. When she is cornered in her home by Leon Turner, a white man who refuses to take no for an answer, Mary Ella narrowly avoids an attempted rape. After his arrest, Leon escapes jail and enacts a bloody revenge with two accomplices. With the eyes of the nation watching, the state itself is on trial. The jury's controversial decision ultimately serves as a catalyst for change.