The Insanity Plea

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Recommended: a paper on postpartum psychosis showing introduction to the study.

On Sunday, February 27, 1859, Philip Barton Key was gunned down in front of the White House. Key was a high-profile man in Washington D.C as the city’s District Attorney and also the son of Francis Scott Key, an American icon and the writer of the national anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner. Twelve people were witness to the shooting and some believe that President James Buchanan who was in office at the time, might have also been a witness. The shooter, Daniel Sickles, who was a United States Congressman had previously been a Union Army general in the Civil War. The story starts with Sickles’ wife apparently having a public, ongoing affair with Key. Daniel Sickles was aware of the affair, but on that fateful day, he caught Philip Barton Key calling up to the window of the room where his wife slept. Consequently, Sickles flew into a rage which resulted in his merciless shooting of Key. Afterwards, he was charged with first-degree murder, which at the time, in some states, was punishable by capital punishment, which was execution. However, this was not the case for Daniel Sickles, whose trial concluded with the verdict from the all-male jury being “not guilty”.
Nearly one and a half centuries later, “not guilty” were once again the famous words to conclude a murder trial about a mother who killed all of her children. The story of Andrea Yates involves one of the most famous criminal trials in our history. In 2001, Yates murdered her five children by drowning them one at a time in her bathtub. The oldest of these children was a 7 year old boy and the youngest; an infant girl at just 6 months. In court, Yates admitted to the murders, and also claimed that she did them because she was saving her children from Satan.
In both cases, ...

... middle of paper ...

...ould most likely have been put behind bars. Before the shooting, he was competent enough to lead an army and also get elected as a Congressman. After the shooting, he walked away, full aware that he had just committed murder. On the other hand, Andrea Yates was truly a sick person mentally, before, during and after she killed her children. In the end though, both Daniel Sickles and Andrea Yates walked away without consequence for their crimes.

Works Cited

http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/insanity_defense http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/psychology/insanity/1.html http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hinckley/hinckleyinsanity.htm http://blogs.weta.org/boundarystones/2013/06/24/cold-blooded-murder-lafayette-square-sickles-tragedy-1859 http://murderpedia.org/female.Y/y/yates-andrea.htm
www.postpartum.net/get-the-facts/postpartum-psychosis.aspx‎

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