Medicine: Insanity in Court

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The question of what constitutes insanity for purposes of the law, which has plagued jurists and psychiatrists for a century (TIME, April 4, 1955), got a spectacular airing in Massachusetts last week. In Boston, the governor's executive council of nine (lawyers and laymen, no judges) ended, with a dramatic reversal, a long debate with its collective conscience over the fate of Kenneth Chapin, 20, of Springfield, who two years ago used a bayonet to stab to death a 14-year-old baby sitter and her four-year-old charge.* What convinced the council was expert and dramatic psychiatric testimony.

"The Way I Am." After his arrest in 1954, Chapin got a routine psychiatric examination and was adjudged sane enough to stand trial. One by one, eight Massachusetts psychiatrists pronounced him sane, although one said that the sullen young killer was in the "early stages" of schizophrenia. The defense tried to prove Chapin a victim of psychomotor epilepsy —not necessarily related to insanity.

Sentenced to death. Chapin appeared before a committee of the governor's council sitting as a pardons board. He could give no motive for the double killing beyond the fact that the baby sitter, Lynn Ann Smith, had screamed when she saw the bayonet in his hand. As he told it: "She opened the door, and the knife was in my hand, and she screamed. I was pushed from behind, or catapulted, but nobody was there." Asked whether he wanted his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, Chapin muttered: "Just as soon go, just as soon go." The council voted, 6-3, to let him go to the chair.

But last week the council heard new evidence in a tense, six-hour session with famed German-born Fredric Wertham, for 20 years senior psychiatrist in New York City's hospital system. Author of The Show of Violence and The Circle of Guilt, he has a knack of appearing in such cases. Dr. Wertham listed 19 telltale signs of schizophrenia, found all of them in Chapin. One was lack of insight. "When I asked him what made him commit the murders, he answered: 'It's the way I am, I guess.' " Another item: "I had the feeling in talking to Chapin that I was talking to him through a glass wall. He had no emotion whatsoever."

"Cancer of the Mind." Dr. Wertham made his most telling point when he banged his right hand repeatedly on the table, counting the 38 times that Chapin had stabbed the baby sitter and the 23 times he had stabbed the child. "Imagine doing this 38 times," he said. "He slaughtered this little girl, he stabbed her, then the little boy, and then went back and stabbed her again. He certainly acted like a madman that night." To Wertham there was no doubt that Chapin had suffered, at the time of the crime, from schizophrenia —"a malignant disease, the cancer of the mind"—and that he had not known the meaning of what he was doing.

On Dr. Wertham's say-so, three members of the council reversed themselves and the body voted, 6-3, for commutation. Concluded Wertham: to electrocute Chapin would have been no deterrent to others because "it was a crazy crime and no juvenile on the street associates himself with this boy."