lookingland

32 days and counting down now: (won't you be glad when it's done?)

last night i started writing the doctors Barnes, Porter, et al. scene.

i realized i could set it in the hall of the jail instead of the courtroom ~ the dramatic effect would work wonderfully and we would have a respite from the interrogation box. i could also splice all the relevent parts of the testimony together and eliminate the repeats.

all this lead me to do a little side trip into the so-called "Shakespearean test" for insanity (popular then, and the method by which Barnes judged the defendent competent). this test consisted of using a study of Shakespeare's characters as the meter stick by which moral sanity should be determined (including: "that a well-formed brain, a good shaped head, is essential to a good mind.") ~ and i thought dr. nicholls for the defense was a crackpot! you can't make up stuff this bizarre.

geez.

suddenly all that talk about constipation doesn't seem like the most absurd part of the testimony.

: o p

one thing i do find curious is that Poppet called McCall, Hubbard, etc. to testify for the defense, but did not call Porter. Porter was called for the prosecution and asserted that the prisoner was sane, but the commission wouldn't permit Poppet to cross-examine beyond asking after the prisoner's physical well-being ~ when it was Porter who would have been able to best judge Chammy's deluded thinking, seeing as he saw him twice a day every day for the duration of the incarceration. nobody bothered to call Hanty, but he's not a doctor, so i guess that makes sense.

i think it's clear that Chammy wasn't "crazy" in the sort of raving lunatic sense of the word that most people in that era would have recognized. Poppet was trying to get at something without the science or the psychiatric vocabulary to get at it (i.e. that Chammy, who was otherwise a righteous well-mannered innocent, was a victim of childhood brainwashing by the war, that silly fanatic actor person, and the southern agenda ~ he talks about the "four schools" of the assassin: slavery, war, hatred, and destitution). he wasn't trying to excuse Chammy's actions, but he was trying to mitigate his culpability). of course the commission wouldn't hear it. they weren't interested in "excuses".

i said before that i once thought Poppet's defense was crazier than he was making his client out to be. it was actually pretty clever and would have probably worked in a civil court, even today (that, and if Dr. Nicholls hadn't abandoned him mid-testimony). in fact, it did work less than a year later when nicholls got Miss Harris (a case running concurrently with this one) off on an insanity plea after she shot her lover for ditching her. counsel argued that the woman was a victim of romantic delusions inflicted by the dead man and rendered out of control by her suffering from pms.

there's one for the books! (law students would prolly recognize that case; it inadvertantly set back the legitimacy of the insanity defense by 100 years)

none of this, of course, changes the fact that the whole valiant attempt backfired completely when Nicholls's wife died and he left Poppet in the lurch. without Nicholls, Poppet had nothing to stand on. it's doubtful that Nicholls's testimony would have gotten Chammy off the hook. but he could have at least saved Poppet from what must have been an utterly humiliating day in court.

: o p

anyway, i have no idea how many words i wrote (not many, but they're words that count).

in other news: the work on Jack is going much more slowly that i thought (and that's starting to worry me). i want to finish the layouts this weekend if at all possible, and then there's still the cover and end material to deal with (which i have so far put no thought into).

and let's just not even talk about the fact that i haven't started Eleison at this point.

i dunno why we agreed to do two books this year. but it's gotta get done. and this seems to be how it always goes, so i need to get to it.

the picture of the day: completely unrelated to anything for a change ~