The Tragedy of Mental Illness

The Tragedy of Mental Illness

In going through Legal Executions in New England, I have found nineteen cases where a person was executed for crimes that are clearly or likely the result of severe mental illness. There was a notion of not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) even at the start of the Colonial period, but just like today, the legal definition of NGRI is far narrower than the medical or conventional definition of insanity. The first NGRI verdict in Pennsylvania is in the 1740s. This being a book of executions, it doesn't include any situations (except one) where a person was found NGRI--and that one case involved a person who was NGRI, then committed another murder some years later, and this time, the jury wasn't taking any chances. That is also like today, where juries have sometimes found people sane who were clearly not (some as the cannibal serial killer Kemper)--for fear that they might be released. Still, while I haven't found a list of all NGRI verdicts, I don't get the impression that there are dozens of such cases.

Most of these are executions for murder, but in a few cases, there are people murdered for witchcraft where their confession clearly shows mental illness. There are people who confess to witchcraft in the Colonial period who genuinely believed that they were successfully casting spells to cause livestock to die and to afflict people--but I am not including those. I'm including people who have hallucinations that they were having sex with devils, for example, and confess to such crimes.

There are several murders in the list that while not clearly mental illness, don't make sense otherwise. There are some cases like that of Alice Bishop of Plymouth, who in 1648 slit her four year old daughter Martha's throat from ear to ear. She pleaded guilty, but refused at any point to explain why she did this. There are crimes that are incredibly brutal without any apparent reason, where the accused either wouldn't explain his actions, and freely admitted what he had done, with no apparent concern about the consequences. (And these are such heinous crimes that I won't even tell you about them.)

Considering the number of people in New England, and the more than 150 years covered, this is really a very low number of cases.

Still, every case is a tragedy. There is a Peter Abbott of Fairfield, Conn. who began to evince symptoms of lunacy as he grew into adulthood. “For that reason he was kept close to home, working in tandem with his father.” Schizophrenia usually shows itself in the teen or early adult years. The idea of keeping him close to home, in the hopes of preventing him from coming to harm, or harming others, was a good idea--but he married, and soon, there was no one to supervise him. Peter Abbott was executed in 1667 for murdering his wife and attempting to murder his child by slitting their throats while they slept.