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 unsympathetic—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 catalepsy. 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.”
Since it was already 2:00 P.M. by this point, the the judge called a one-hour recess. When the trial resumed at 3:00, Train proceeded with his summation.
He commenced by rebutting one of Robinson’s key points—that the “motivelessness” of the Millen killing was proof of Jesse’s insanity. “On the contrary,” said Train, “an insane man nearly always gives a reason for his crimes.” Citing several well-known homicides committed by certified madmen, Train pointed out that, in each case, the perpetrator had taken great pains to justify his deeds—usually by insisting that he was acting under orders from God. If Jesse were truly insane, then he, too, “would have assigned an insane reason for his acts.” Thus, argued Train, the boy’s “inability to provide a motive could not be construed into an element of insanity.”
It was now Train’s turn to wring tears from his listeners. Presumably by way of stressing the cold-blooded nature of the Millen slaying, Train proceeded to “draw a graphic picture of the struggles of the little innocent while the fiend was mangling his body and slashing him with a knife in the most demoniac fashion” (as the Boston Globe reported). This “all too vivid picture affected every person in court and brought tears and sobs from the ladies.”
In reality, there were at least two people in attendance who were conspicuously unaffected by this part of Train’s performance—Ruth Pomeroy (who had wept during Charles Robinson’s climactic plea but now sat in stony-faced silence) and Jesse himself, who, as he had throughout most of the proceedings, appeared vaguely bored.
Train continued by arguing that the entire insanity plea was a last, desperate recourse on the part of Jesse’s counsel. It was not until Mr. Robinson had failed to come up with any other feasible line of defense—four full months after starting work on the case—that he called in Drs. Walker and Tyler. Those two “learned gentlemen,” Train asserted, “knew perfectly well” that the defense was relying on them to arrive at a diagnosis of insanity.
“The difference between the testimony of the experts,” said Train, “was that Dr. Tyler and Dr. Walker took a series of sane acts and constructed therefrom a proof of insanity; whereas Dr. Choate concluded from the same materials that, at the time of the commission of the homicide, its perpetrator was in the enjoyment of all the faculties of his mind, and in a healthy and sound condition.” Indeed, Train pointed out, even Drs. Tyler and Walker had been forced to admit under cross-examination that Jesse’s behavior during his crimes was, by and large, “consistent with a sane mind.”
Train concluded his summation by calling on the jury to render a verdict based strictly on the evidence presented at the trial. Clearly, the attorney general did not wish the jury to be swayed by any qualms about sending a fourteen-year-old boy to the gallows. The age of the defendant, he argued, “was of no account in the case; and his punishment should not form any consideration in making up a verdict.” It was solely “to the interest of the community” and “to the vindication of law and order” that the jurors “should turn their minds.” They must return a verdict of guilty “in order to restrain thousands of men from acts similar to those for which the defendant is being tried. It was for the fathers and mothers who had sons who might be abused as the prisoner’s victims had been that the jury should do its manful duty.”
It was nearly 5:30 P.M. when the attorney general reseated himself at the prosecutor’s table. Turning to the prisoner, Chief Justice Gray informed Jesse that he now had the right to address the jury on his own behalf, if he so desired.
“I have nothing to say,” Jesse answered with a little shrug.
Judge Gray then proceeded to deliver his charge to the jury. Though the trial had, in fact, been conducted with remarkable dispatch—proceeding from opening statements to closing arguments in just two days—the judge began by complimenting the jurors on their patience and promising not to detain them with “any lengthy review of the testimony.”
It was not the jury’s business to question the wisdom of the law, he explained, but rather to ascertain whether the accused person had violated it. In the present case, “the first question to be asked was, did the defendant kill the boy? And the answer, he averred, was self-evident, since “the testimony of the various witnesses, as well as the confession of the accused, left no doubt on that point.”
The next question to be decided was, “what degree of murder it was.” The law, he explained, stipulated that anyone fourteen years or older was responsible for his acts, so long as he was “of ordinary capacities and sound mind.” Thus, if the defendant was sane at the time of the slaying, the verdict must be murder in the first degree. But if there was a doubt as to his sanity—if he was acting under an irresistible impulse—the prisoner should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
In a brief review of the psychiatric arguments, Judge Gray reminded the jurors that “counsel for the defense had claimed that their client knew that his acts were wrong, but that he was neverthless drawn on by an irresistible impulse and was actually forced into their commission. Dr. Tyler and Dr. Walker testified that the boy was insane; while Dr. Choate was of the opinion that he was possessed of all his mental faculties and in a sound condition.” Ultimately it was for the jury to decide “how far the expert testimony should go in deciding on the question of the defendant’s sanity.”
Altogether, the judge’s remarks lasted less than a half hour. At a few minutes before 6:00 P.M.—after committing the case to the jury—Chief Justice Gray and his associate, Judge Morton, rose from the bench and retired to their chambers without adjourning the court.
Though a number of spectators took their leave at that point, most remained in their seats, keeping up—as the Herald’s reporter noted—“a steady buzz of conversation.” For the most part, the crowd remained “very decorous and orderly, as they had been all through the trial.” Even so, there was a good deal of heated—and occasionally contentious—debate about “which verdict the jury would bring in.” Taking an informal poll as he moved around the room, the reporter discovered a notable lack of consensus among the spectators—“opinions being almost equally divided between verdicts of guilty in the first degree and not guilty by reason of insanity.”
* * *
The split opinion of the spectators at the 1874 trial of Jesse Harding Pomeroy reflected the extreme difficulty of fathoming the bizarre mentality of sociopathic murderers—the kind of “human monsters” we now call serial killers. What makes the psychology of these beings so hard to understand is precisely their bewildering combination of rationality and madness—their terrifyingly cool and cunning ability to plan, execute, and cover up the most hideous crimes imaginable.
Indeed, one of the most astute discussions of this phenomenon was composed not many years after the Pomeroy trial by the great American novelist, Herman Melville. In his last, posthumously published masterpiece, Billy Budd, Melville creates a portrait of sheer, personified evil in the figure of John Claggart, the malevolent master-at-arms who sets about, with fiendish calculation, to utterly destroy the naive title character. Seeking to comprehend the viciously depraved nature of creatures like Claggart, Melville offers an analysis that stands, even today, as one of the best definitions of the sociopathic mind ever written:
But the thing which in eminent instances signalizes so exceptional a nature is this: Though the man’s even temper and discreet bearing would seem to indicate a mind peculiarly subject to the law of reason, not less in heart would he seem to riot in complete exemption from that law, having apparently little to do with reason further than to employ it as an ambidexter implement for effecting the irrational. That is to say: Toward the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of atrocity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgment sagacious and sound. These men are madmen, and the most dangerous sort, for their lunacy is not continuous, but occasional, evoked by some special object;
it is protectively secret, which is as much to say it is self-contained, so that when, moreover, most active it is to the average mind not distinguishable from sanity, and for the reason above suggested: that whatever its aims may be . . . the method and the outward proceeding are always perfectly rational.
Though the term “serial murder” is of relatively recent origin (dating back only to the early 1970s, when it was coined by FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler), Melville’s description, written more than a hundred years ago, makes it clear that psychopathic criminals have always existed. And it also explains why the ordinary person finds it so hard to judge the mental state of such beings. Though a killer like Jeffrey Dahmer might engage in acts whose “wantonness of atrocity,” as Melville puts it, “partakes of the insane”—mutilation-murder, cannibalism, necrophilia, sexual torture, etc.—he will generally operate with a high degree of rationality and shrewdness: “a cool judgment, sagacious and sound.” Moreover, as Melville perceives, such killers, for the most part, present a perfectly normal facade to the world, their “lunacy” remaining dormant until triggered “by some special object.”
Clearly, judging the mental soundness of a person whose intelligence and reason are employed in the service of insanely violent drives is no easy task. So it is not at all surprising that, when the reporter for the Boston Herald polled the crowd at the Pomeroy trial, he found a good deal of disagreement over the question of Jesse’s responsibility. And though the jury itself would quickly arrive at a unanimous decision, a certain measure of ambivalence would be apparent in their verdict as well.
* * *
Shortly before 8:30 P.M., Chief Justice Gray and Associate Justice Morton reentered the courtroom, having been informed that the jurors required clarification on two key points. A minute later, the jury emerged from the deliberation room and put two questions to the judges. First: “If the prisoner took the Millen boy down to the marsh with the intention of inflicting torture on him, such as he’d inflicted on the other boys, and after getting him there, he concluded at the last moment to kill him, would such an act be premeditated aforethought?” Their second question was: “Does a homicide committed under circumstances of extreme atrocity, unaccompanied by premeditation, constitute murder in the first degree?”
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