carriage, pregnant with her first child, had also been found not guilty by reason of insanity. “We have seen the trials of Oxford and MacNaughtan [spelling variation] conducted by the ablest lawyers of the day,” Queen Victoria had written in disgust to Peel after the M’Naghten ruling, “and they allow and advise the Jury to pronounce the verdict of Not Guilty on account of Insanity,—whilst everybody is morally convinced that both malefactors were perfectly conscious and aware of what they did!” Before her eventual death in 1901, at the age of eighty-one, Queen Victoria would survive several more assassination attempts. Her husband, who had lived to witness four of them, was convinced that the would-be assassins had been encouraged by Oxford’s acquittal.
The House of Lords, in agreement with the queen, decided that the country needed a clear, strict definition of criminal insanity. Less than four months after M’Naghten’s trial, the judges of the British Supreme Court ruled that, in essence, the difference between a sane man and one who was insane lay in the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. A defendant, they declared, could use the insanity defense only if, “at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from a disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.”
The M’Naghten Rule, while quickly adopted in the United States as well as in England, did little to improve the reputation of the insanity defense. In America, it became known as the “insanity dodge,” the refuge not of the mad but of the guilty. Celebrity cases only made matters worse. In 1859, Congressman Daniel Edgar Sickles was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity after shooting to death Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Thirteen years later, Edward Stokes, the man who murdered James Fisk, Jay Gould’s partner, used the same defense and spent only four years in prison.
It came as no surprise, therefore, when, on October 14, Garfield’s assassin submitted his plea to Judge Walter Cox. “I plead not guilty to the indictment,” Guiteau stated, in a plea that he had drafted himself. His first and primary defense was “Insanity, in that it was God’s act and not mine. The Divine pressure on me to remove the president was so enormous that it destroyed my free agency, and therefore I am not legally responsible for my act.” Although Guiteau laid blame for the shooting squarely on God’s shoulders, he made it clear that his faith in divine intervention—at least when his own life was at stake—remained unshaken. “I have entire confidence in His disposition to protect me,” he wrote in the plea, “and to send me forth to the world a free and innocent man.”
Guiteau would follow the lead of M’Naghten, Oxford, Sickles, and Stokes, and attempt to use his insanity to save his life. Legally, he was allowed this argument, and there was nothing anyone could do to prevent it. It was clear to all involved in the case, however, that the American people would accept no verdict but guilty, no sentence but death. “Guiteau should have a fair trial. Everything that can be urged in his behalf should be patiently heard. It is the right of the meanest thing that bears a human form,” one editorial argued. “But such a trial, such a hearing, in a community of intelligent beings can have but one result.”
The case of the United States v. Charles J. Guiteau began on the morning of November 14, less than two months after Garfield’s death. Guiteau’s attorney was his brother-in-law, George Scoville, who had come to his rescue countless times in the past with a place to live and loans to keep him alive and out of prison. Scoville was a patent lawyer, and knew almost nothing about the criminal justice system, but he was one of the few lawyers in the country willing to represent the president’s assassin. Even Scoville admitted, “If I didn’t think the unfortunate man was insane, I would not defend him at all.”
As difficult as it was to find a competent defense attorney, it had been nearly impossible to assemble a dispassionate jury. When asked if he would be able to render an impartial verdict in the trial of Guiteau, one prospective