Lincoln's Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency

[David Lockmiller]

(08-15-2018 10:27 AM)L Verge Wrote:  David - For many decades, I, too, have believed that the Sickles case was the first use of "temporary insanity."

Laurie,

I became interested last night in the Sickles "temporary insanity" case and did a Google search on the subject and found an informative and well-written article published this year in the Washington Post. Since it was not-at-all Lincoln related, except for the fact that it provides some insight into the character of Lincoln's future Secretary of War, I decided not to include it in my post. I did some editing of the story and because of your post, I thought that you and others might be interested in the details of the Sickles "temporary insanity" trial. And, interestingly enough, it also took a favorable instruction to the jury ruling by the court for Stanton to succeed.

In the Stanton defense case, first-term New York Democratic congressman Daniel Edgar Sickles (and later Union general) murdered his wife's lover, Philip Barton Key II, the district attorney for Washington and the son of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The Sickleses — who married when she was 16 and he was 33 — seemed like many of the ambitious power couples that turn up in Washington. They were the parents of a 6-year-old daughter. They held receptions, dinners and balls at their home on what is now Jackson Place on the west side of Lafayette Square.

Sickles was anonymously informed of the sexual affair between his wife and Philip Barton Key II. And, in a written confession demanded by her husband after he learned of the affair, she admitted that the two had engaged in “intimacy of an improper kind.” More colorfully, she put it another way: “I did what is usual for a wicked woman to do.”

Sickles waited to take his revenge on Key. The opportunity presented itself two days later. Sickles spied the district attorney walking along Madison Place on Lafayette Square, signaling for Teresa. Sickles, with two single-barrel Derringers and a revolver — stormed out of his house toward Key on the other side of the park.

Key extended his hand, thinking the encounter would be friendly. He quickly found out otherwise. “You have dishonored my home and family,” Sickles roared. He began firing. After a third shot from the congressman, Key fell to the ground, dead. Sickles then walked to the house of a neighbor, Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black, and surrendered.

The case seemed straightforward. Sickles admitted shooting Key and expressed no remorse for killing the district attorney who had cuckolded him. “He has dishonored me, and we could not live together on the same planet,” Sickles told the New York Tribune in a jailhouse interview.

But Sickles had no intention of pleading guilty and passively accepting the judgment of the court. He assembled a top-flight defense team that included lawyers from New York and Edwin M. Stanton, a well-connected attorney in Washington.

In addition to presenting their client as a wronged man, attorneys argued that he was temporarily insane at the time of the shooting. Stanton told the court that the Teresa Sickles' affair with Key had put her on the road toward “the horrid filth that is common prostitution.” The courtroom erupted in applause as Stanton described Sickles’s motives as honorable — “the death of Key was a cheap sacrifice to save one mother from the horrible fate,” the attorney declared.

The two-pronged defense strategy — portraying Sickles both as briefly unhinged and acting with justification — proved effective. The presiding judge bought the argument about temporary insanity and instructed the jury to consider Sickles’s state of mind at the time of the shooting.

The jury deliberated for a little more than an hour before returning a not-guilty verdict. “[C]heer after cheer resounded in the Court room,” the Herald reported, “and it was taken up by the multitude outside and repeated.”

After the trial, reports surfaced that Daniel and Teresa Sickles had reconciled. The congressman confirmed their rapprochement in a letter to the New York Herald on July 19 in which he pleaded for the public to leave Teresa alone and direct its fury at him.

(Source: Washington Post, March 3, 2018, "‘Temporarily insane’: A congressman, a sensational killing and a new legal defense," by Robert Mitchell)