Argument of William H. Seward, in Defence of William Freeman, on His Trial for Murder, at Auburn, July 21st and 22d, 1846

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H. Oliphant, printer, 1846 - 31 Seiten

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Seite 3 - In order to constitute a crime, a person must have intelligence and capacity enough to have a criminal intent and purpose; and if his reason and mental powers are either so deficient that he has no will, no 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, and is not punishable for criminal acts.
Seite 6 - When the judge shall proceed to the last fatal ceremony, and demand what he has to say why the sentence of the law should not be pronounced upon him...
Seite 8 - Such a verdict can do no good to the living, and carry no joy to the dead. If your judgment shall be swayed at all by sympathies so wrong, although so natural, you will find the saddest hour of your life to be that in which you will look down upon the grave of your victim, and "mourn with compunctious sorrow...
Seite 6 - Sally's son. It has never forsaken him in his later trials. He laughed in the face of Parker, while on confession at Baldwinsville. He laughed involuntarily in the faces of Warden and Curtis, and Worden and Austin, and Bigelow and Smith, and Brigham and Spencer. He laughs perpetually here. Even when Van...
Seite 1 - 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 is descended.
Seite 4 - ... the brain should be diseased ? What organ, member, bone, muscle, sinew, vessel or nerve is not subject to disease ? What is physical man, but a frail, perishing body, that begins to decay as soon as it begins to exist ? What is there of animal existence here on earth exempt from disease and decay ? Nothing. The world is full of disease, and that is the great agent of change, renovation and health. And what wrong or error can there be in supposing that the mind may be so affected by disease of...
Seite 11 - ... taught to read, his mother, who lives by menial service, sends him forth at the age of eight or nine years to like employment. Reproaches are cast on his mother, on Mr. Warden, and on Mr. Lynch, for not sending him to school, but these reproaches are all unjust. How could she, poor degraded negress and Indian as she was, send her child to school ? And where was the school to which Warden and Lynch should have sent him ? There was no school for him. His few and wretched years date back to the...
Seite 6 - ... eye in this vast assembly, and the stern voice addressing him should tremble with emotion, he will even then look up in the face of the Court and laugh, from the irresistible emotions of a shattered mind, delighted and lost in the confused memory of absurd and ridiculous associations. Follow him to the scaffold. The executioner cannot disturb the calmness of the idiot He will laugh in the agony of death.

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