mind and memory to distinguish between right and wrong in the abstract, yet that he had not reason and understanding and will to regulate his conduct according to that distinction; in short, a verdict by which the jury unworthily evaded the question submitted to them, and cast upon the court a responsibility which it had no right to assume, but which it did nevertheless assume, in violation of the law. That twelfth juror was afterward drawn as a juror in this cause, and was challenged by the counsel for the people for partiality to the prisoner, and the challenge was sustained by the court, because, although he had, as the court say, pronounced by his verdict that the prisoner was sane, he then declared that he believed the prisoner insane, and would die in the jury box before he would render a verdict that he was sane. Last and chief of all objections to that verdict now, it has been neither pleaded nor proved here, and therefore is not in evidence before you. I trust then that you will dismiss to the contempt of mankind that jury and their verdict, which thus equivocated upon law and science, health and disease, crime and innocence.

Again. An inferior standard of intelligence has been set up here as a standard of the negro race, and a false one as a standard of the Asiatic race. This prisoner traces a divided lineage. On the paternal side his ancestry is lost among the tiger hunters on the gold coast of Africa, while his mother constitutes a portion of the small remnant of the Narragansett tribe. Hence it is held that the prisoner's intellect is to be compared with the depreciating standard of the African, and his passions with the violent and ferocious character erroneously imputed to the aborigines. Indications of manifest derangement, or at least of imbecility, approaching to idiocy, are therefore set aside, on the ground that they harmonize with the legitimate but degraded characteristics of the races from which he comes. You, gentlemen, have, or ought to have, lifted up your souls above the bondage of prejudices so narrow and so mean as these. The color of the prisoner's skin, and the form of his features, are not impressed upon the spiritual, immortal mind which works beneath. In spite of human pride, he is still your brother, and mine, in form and color accepted and approved by his Father, and yours, and mine, and bears equally with us the proudest inheritance of our race-the image of our Maker. Hold him then to be a MAN. Exact of him all the responsibilities which should be exacted under like circumstances if

he belonged to the Anglo-Saxon race, and make for him all the allowances, and deal with him with all the tenderness which, under like circumstances, you would expect for yourselves.

The prisoner was obliged-no, his counsel were obliged, by law, to accept the plea of Not Guilty, which the court directed to be entered in his behalf. That plea denies the homicide. If the law had allowed it, we would gladly have admitted all the murders of which the prisoner was accused, and have admitted them to be as unprovoked as they were cruel, and have gone directly before you on the only defence upon which we have insisted, or shall insist, or could insist-that he is irresponsible, because he was and is insane.

We labor, not only under these difficulties, but under the further embarrassment that the plea of insanity is universally suspected. It is the last subterfuge of the guilty, and so is too often abused. But however obnoxious to suspicion this defence is, there have been cases where it was true; and when true, it is of all pleas the most perfect and complete defence that can be offered in any human tribunal. Our Saviour forgave his judges because "they knew not what they did." The insane man who has committed a crime, knew not what he did. If this being, dyed with human blood, be insane, you and I, and even the children of your affections, are not more guiltless than he.

Is there reason to indulge a suspicion of fraud here? Look at this stupid, senseless fool, almost as inanimate as the clay moulded in the brick-yard, and say, if you dare, that you are afraid of being deceived by him. Look at me. You all know me. Am I a man to engage in a conspiracy to deceive you and defraud justice? Look on us all, for although I began the defence of this cause alone, thanks to the generosity, to the magnanimity of an enlightened profession, I come out strong in the assistance of counsel never before attached to me in any relation, but strongly grappled to me now, by these new and endearing ties. Is any one of us a man to be suspected? The testimony is closed. Look through it all. Can suspicion or malice find in it any ground to accuse us of a plot to set up a false and fabricated defence? I will give you, gentlemen, a key to every case where insanity has been wrongfully, and yet successfully maintained. Gold, influence, popular favor, popular sympathy, raised that defence, and made it impregnable. But you have never seen a poor, worthless, spir

itless, degraded negro like this, acquitted wrongfully. I wish this trial may prove that such an one can be acquitted rightfully. The danger lies here. There is not a WHITE man or WHITE woman who would not have been dismissed long since from the perils of such a prosecution, if it had only been proved that the offender was so ignorant and so brutalized as not to understand that the defence of insanity had been interposed.

prisoner's ruin? Was it in secret,

If he feign, who has trained the idiot to perform this highest and most difficult of all intellectual achievements? Is it I? Shakspeare and Cervantes only, of all mankind, have conceived and perfected a counterfeit of insanity. Is it I? Why is not the imposition exposed, to my discomfiture and the Where was it done? Was it in public, here? in the jail? His deafened ears could not hear me there unless I were also overheard by other prisoners, by jailers, constables, the sheriff, and a cloud of witnesses. Who has the keys of the jail? Have I? You have had sheriff, jailer, and the whole police upon the stand. Could none of these witnesses reveal our plot? Were there none to watch and report the abuse? When they tell you, or insinuate, gentlemen, that this man has been taught to feign insanity, they discredit themselves, as did the Roman sentinels, who, appointed to guard the sepulchre of our Saviour, said, in excuse of the broken seal, that while they slept men came and rolled away the stone.

I advance towards the merits of the cause. The law which it involves will be found in the case of Kleim, tried for murder in 1844; before Judge Edmonds, of the first circuit, in the city of New York, reported in the Journal of Insanity for January, 1846, at page 261. I read from the report of the judge's charge:

"He told the Jury that there was no doubt that Kleim had been guilty of the killing imputed to him, and that under circumstances of atrocity and deliberation which were calculated to excite in their minds strong feelings of indignation against him. But they must beware how they permitted such feelings to influence their judgment. They must bear in mind that the object of punishment was not vengeance, but reformation; not to extort from a man an atonement for the life which he cannot give, but by the terror of the example, to deter others from the like offences, and that nothing was so likely to destroy the public confidence in the administration of criminal justice, as the infliction of its pains upon one whom Heaven has already afflicted with the awful malady of insanity."

These words deserve to be written in letters of gold upon tablets of marble. Their reason and philosophy are apparent. If you send the lunatic to the gallows, society will be shocked by your inhumanity, and the advocates for the abolition of capital punish

ment will find their most effective argument in the fact that a jury of the country, through ignorance or passion, or prejudice, have mistaken a madman for a criminal.

The report of Judge Edmonds' charge proceeds:

"It was true that the plea of insanity was sometimes adopted as a cloak for crime, yet it was unfortunately equally true, that many more persons were unjustly convicted, to whom their unquestioned insanity ought to have been an unfailing protection."

This judicial answer to the argument that jurors are too likely to be swayed by the plea of insanity, is perfect and complete. Judge Edmonds further charged the jury—

"That it was by no means an easy matter to discover or define the line of demarkation where sanity ended and insanity began," and that it was often "difficult for those most expert in the disease to detect or explain its beginning, extent, or duration,” “that the classifications of the disease were in a great measure arbitrary, and the jury were not obliged to bring the case of the prisoner within any one of the classes, because the symp toms of the different kinds were continually mingling with each other."

The application of this rule will render the present case perfectly clear, because it appears from the evidence that the prisoner is laboring under a combination of mania or excited madness, with dementia or decay of the mind.

Judge Edmonds furnishes you with a balance to weigh the testimony in the case, in these words:

"It was important that the jury should understand how much weight was to be given to the opinions of medical witnesses. The opinions of men who had devoted themselves to the study of insanity as a distinct department of medical science, and studied recent improvements and discoveries, especially when to that knowledge they added the experience of personal care of the insane, could never be safely disregarded by Courts and Juries; and on the other hand, the opinions of physicians who had not devoted their particular attention to the disease, were not of any more value than the opinions of common persons."

This charge of Judge Edmonds furnishes a lamp to guide your feet, and throws a clear and broad light over your path. He acknowledges, in the first place, with distinguished independence for a judge and a lawyer, that "the law, in its slow and cautious progress, still lags far behind the advance of true knowledge." An insane person is one who, at the time of committing the act, labored under such a defect of reason as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, did not know he was doing what was wrong; and the question is not whether the accused knew the difference between right and wrong generally, but whether he knew the difference between right and wrong in regard to the very act with which he is charged." "If some controlling disease was in truth, the acting power within him, which he could not resist, or if he had not a sufficient use of

his reason to control the passions which prompted him, he is not responsible. But it must be an absolute dispossession of the free and natural agency of the human mind. In the glowing but just language of Erskine, it is not necessary that Reason should be hurled from her seat, it is enough that Distraction sits down beside her, holds her trembling in her place, and frightens her from her propriety."

Judge Edmonds proceeds:

"And it must be borne in mind that the moral as well as the intellectual faculties may be so disordered by the disease as to deprive the mind of its controlling and directing power. In order then to establish a crime, a man must have memory and intelligence to know that the act he is about to commit is wrong; to remember and understand, that if he commit the act, he will be subject to punishment; and reason and will to enable him to compare and choose between the supposed advantage or gratification to be obtained by the criminal act, and the immunity from punishment which he will secure by abstaining from it.

"If, on the other hand, he have not intelligence enough to have a criminal intent and purpose; and if his moral or intellectual powers are either so deficient that he has not sufficient will, conscience, or controlling mental power; or if through the overwhelming violence of mental disease his intellectual power is for the time obliterated, he is not a responsible moral agent."

The learned Judge recommends to the jury,

“As aids to a just conclusion, to consider the extraordinary and unaccountable alteration in the prisoner's whole mode of life; the inadequacy between the slightness of the cause and the magnitude of the offence; the recluse and ascetic life which he had led; his invincible repugnance to all intercourse with his fellow creatures; his behavior and conduct at the time the act was done, and subsequently during his confinement; and the stolid indifference which he alone had manifested during the whole progress of a trial upon which his life or death depended."

Kleim was acquitted, and sent, according to law, to the State Lunatic Asylum at Utica. The Superintendent of the Asylum, in a note to this report, states that Kleim is uniformly mild and pleasant, has not asked a question, or spoken or learned the name of any one; seems very imperfectly to recollect the murder or the trial; says he "was put in prison; does not know what for; and was taken to the court, but had no trial;" that his bodily health is good, but that his mind is nearly gone-quite demented.

You cannot fail, Gentlemen of the Jury, to remark the extraordinary similarity between the case of Kleim, as indicated in the charge of Judge Edmonds, and that of the prisoner at the bar. If I were sure you would receive such a charge, and be guided by it, I might rest here, and defy the eloquence of the Attorney General. The proof of insanity in this case is of the same nature, and the disease in the same form as in the case of Kleim. The only difference is, that the evidence here is a thousand times more conclusive. But Judge Edmonds does not preside here. Kleim was a white man, Freeman is a negro. Kleim set fire to a house, to