Horn shook his head as if to say, Let the clown have his act.
“We have in this state a statute which says the court, before he passes sentence on a human being, may inquire whether there are mitigating circumstances. Now what does this mean? Is there any catalogue? No, the court must tell, it is for him to decide and no one else.
“What is a mitigating circumstance? Youth itself. Simply because a child hasn’t judgment. Why, we’ve all been young and we know the vagaries of the mind of a child. We know the dream world it is in; we know that nothing is real. These two boys are minors. The law forbids them making contracts, from marrying without their parents’ consent. Why? Because they haven’t judgment, which comes only with years. I can’t understand lawyers who would talk of hanging boys as they would talk of a holiday – as they would talk of the races.
“About seven years ago, a poor boy named Petnick was charged with murder and I was asked by a charitable organization to defend him. He went to a house one day to deliver groceries and picked up a knife and killed a mother and her baby.
“I entered a plea of guilty, as in this case. I called his school teacher to show his mental condition, and I called alienists to prove the state of that poor boy’s mind. Judge Willard, a former partner of Mr. Horn here, said he would not hang that boy. And yet in this courtroom today we are told that the court may not consider such a circumstance!” He gazed reproachfully at the prosecution. “They say that’s the law – you are told you can’t even hear this testimony in mitigation. If that’s the law, I trust this court will ignore it, as the courts do ignore it constantly!”
Horn exploded. “In the name of the women and the children of this state,” he screamed, “I ask Your Honour whether this has ceased to be a court of law! Mr. Wilk tells Your Honour to ignore the law, to bum the criminal code!” He glared at the forgotten Dr. McNarry, the cause of the two-day argument. “You would indeed have to disregard the law, to hear this witness!”
With a brusque movement, the judge made his decision. “Under the wording of the statute I must hear evidence in mitigation and evidence in aggravation. The objection of the State is overruled, and the defence may proceed.”
Judd and Artie were alight, as though all had been won.
What could Dr. McNarry tell? Why had the State’s Attorney fought for two whole days to keep out his testimony?
McNarry began with Artie, detailing how the habit of lying evolved until “he himself says that he found it difficult to distinguish between what was true and what was not true.”
Horn broke in: “I submit that we are getting now clearly into an insanity hearing and I move that a jury be empanelled.”
“Motion denied,” said the judge.
McNarry came to the fantasy life, and Horn tried the other tack. “This condition you have described is sometimes called building castles in the air, is it not? Is that not quite common among boys?”
“Surely,” the alienist agreed. “But air castles are generally considered to be something beautiful and desirable, while these-”
“Don’t most boys have daydreams about dungeons and escapes?”
Judge Matthewson said stiffly, “Let the doctor proceed without interruption; cross-examine when he gets through.”
The doctor described the shadowing in the street, the jail fantasy, and how when Artie finally got into jail he “felt as if he belonged there and was living out in reality what he used to picture to himself as a child”. He told of the curious “continuance into his present life of a practice he had as an infant, confiding in his teddy bear, ‘And now, Teddy…’” He summarized: “Whereas fantasy life is compensatory, it also foreshadows our real conduct. He thinks of himself in prison, as a master criminal. The significance is on the emotional side because it is in the emotions that the fantasy life has its roots.” Artie was remaining, then, emotionally a child, a bad child seeking punishment.
To show how fantasy imposed itself and could even obliterate reality, the psychiatrist reminded us that despite Artie’s genera! popularity everywhere, Artie had an idea of himself as unwanted and inferior. This was another sign of Artie’s disintegration, as was his complaint that in the last few years he had felt that he “wasn’t all there”.
“In other words, he has grown to eighteen years of age, but he has carried his infancy with him in the shape of an undeveloped emotional attitude toward life… We see a complete derangement, a complete personality split where there is no longer the possibility of bringing the two aspects of the personality into sufficient harmonious union. Artie is in a stage which is capable, if it goes further, of developing that malignant splitting.”
Would Dr. McNarry discuss the other crimes, A, B, C, D, as further evidence of Artie’s disintegration?
“Artie’s tendency was criminalistic.” But he listed only the minor crimes, already well known. “To fulfill his mastermind fantasy, Artie needed a gang, and Judd was his gang. Now Judd had no fundamental criminalistic tendency.”
This statement in itself startled the courtroom.
Judd’s tendencies, the doctor said, could be expressed as a constant swing between feelings of superiority and feelings of inferiority. He needed a complement, a balance, and had attached Artie as his other ego, sometimes superior, sometimes inferior, as when the king was rescued by the slave.
“Thus, in this fantasy, in either position he occupies, as king or as slave, he gets the expression of both components of his make-up, his desire for subjection on the one part and the desire for supremacy on the other, so that with their effective and emotional relationship to each other, each entire life plays into the other with almost devilish ingenuity, if I may be permitted to use the term.”
While Artie was a disintegrating, a decomposing, personality, saying he had had all he wanted out of life, the alienist showed us Judd as incessantly active, cataloguing churches as a child, then investigating ornithology, analysing languages, and even now in jail projecting a book he would write to explain himself, a speech he would make from the scaffold if he were to hang. Indeed he was even planning a set of questions that he would answer from afterlife, should there prove to be any, though he did not believe any existed.
“So these two boys,” Dr. McNarry continued, in his even tone, “with their peculiar inter-digitating and complementing personalities” – he laced together the fingers of his two hands – “came into this emotional compact, with the Kessler homicide as the result.” It could be described, he said, as a folie à deux, rare enough, since it could not result unless the precise two personalities, by perhaps one chance in millions, came together.
The doctor emphasized this, probably as reassurance to the public, to the world; but even at the time I had a doubting thought: Wouldn’t the needed personalities somehow attract each other, to come together? And since then, of course, we have seen many other crimes out of such conjoinings.
The testimony of Dr. McNarry ended with Edgar Feldscher’s formal questions: “As a result of your examination and observation of the defendant Arthur Straus, have you an opinion as to his mental condition on the twenty-first day of May, 1924?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is that opinion?”
“Well, I have practically expressed it. He was the host of antisocial tendencies along the lines that I have described. He was going in the direction of a split personality, because of this inner unresolved conflict… He is still a child emotionally, still talking to a teddy bear – somewhere around four or five years old. Intellectually, he passes his tests very well.”