Insanity in Court
The question of what constitutes insanity for purposes of the law, whichhas plagued jurists and psychiatrists for a century , got a spectacular airing in Massachusetts last week. In Boston,the governor's executive council of nine ended, with a dramatic reversal, a long debate with itscollective conscience over the fate of Kenneth Chapin, 20, ofSpringfield, who two years ago used a bayonet to stab to death a14-year-old baby sitter and her four-year-old charge.* What convincedthe council was expert and dramatic psychiatric testimony.
"The Way I Am." After his arrest in 1954, Chapin got a routinepsychiatric examination and was adjudged sane enough to stand trial.One by one, eight Massachusetts psychiatrists pronounced him sane,although one said that the sullen young killer was in the "earlystages" of schizophrenia. The defense tried to prove Chapin a victim ofpsychomotor epilepsy —not necessarily related to insanity.
Sentenced to death. Chapin appeared before a committee of the governor'scouncil sitting as a pardons board. He could give no motive for thedouble killing beyond the fact that the baby sitter, Lynn Ann Smith,had screamed when she saw the bayonet in his hand. As he told it: "Sheopened the door, and the knife was in my hand, and she screamed. I waspushed from behind, or catapulted, but nobody was there." Asked whetherhe wanted his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, Chapin muttered:"Just as soon go, just as soon go." The council voted, 6-3, to let him goto the chair.
But last week the council heard new evidence in a tense, six-hoursession with famed German-born Fredric Wertham, for 20 years seniorpsychiatrist in New York City's hospital system. Author of The Show ofViolence and The Circle of Guilt, he has a knack of appearing in suchcases. Dr. Wertham listed 19 telltale signs of schizophrenia, found allof them in Chapin. One was lack of insight. "When I asked him what madehim commit the murders, he answered: 'It's the way I am, I guess.' "Another item: "I had the feeling in talking to Chapin that I wastalking to him through a glass wall. He had no emotion whatsoever."
"Cancer of the Mind." Dr. Wertham made his most telling point when hebanged his right hand repeatedly on the table, counting the 38 timesthat Chapin had stabbed the baby sitter and the 23 times he had stabbedthe child. "Imagine doing this 38 times," he said. "He slaughtered thislittle girl, he stabbed her, then the little boy, and then went backand stabbed her again. He certainly acted like a madman that night." ToWertham there was no doubt that Chapin had suffered, at the time of thecrime, from schizophrenia —"a malignant disease, the cancer of themind"—and that he had not known the meaning of what he was doing.
On Dr. Wertham's say-so, three members of the council reversedthemselves and the body voted, 6-3, for commutation. Concluded Wertham:to electrocute Chapin would have been no deterrent to others because"it was a crazy crime and no juvenile on the street associates himselfwith this boy."
* This week a jury in Mineola, N.Y. faces knotty problems indeciding whether Angelo John LaMarca, 31, who has confessed the fatalkidnaping of month-old Peter Weinberger , had—as heclaims—been driven temporarily insane by the hounding of hiscreditors.
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