Reading Time: 3 minutes [367 words]

EDWARD D. WORRELL. 49

You have been led to believe that no difficulty can attend the
investigation of either subject, that your pathway in both
will be as ‘‘easy aa the road to mill,’’ and that you may there-
fore dismiss from your minds all anxiety, all perturbation, all
solicitude, touching the rightful exercise of the power of life
or death, now commitied to your hands. I must say as respect-
fully as I know how to utter the words, this is ‘“bad adviee.’”
To yield to it is at once & crime in morals and a transgression
of law. No good man ever sat in judgment on the life of his
fellow man, without feeling deeply his responsibility, and to
listen to such counsel is to lose the sense of obligation. If I
thought you agreed with the counsel as to the simplicity of
the issue of insanity, as to the very summary way in which
all such inquiries should be despatched, I should scarcely
trouble you with the mockery of an investigation. Because
I do not think ao, I shall by the defense make it your duty
to investigate evidence of the mental disorder of the prisoner.
In this investigation the first step is sure. ff is certain that
we are not dealing with a case of feigned insanity; for no
man ever yet feigned a mental disorder like Worrell’s, The
firat step is safe, whatever may be said of those which must
follow. The investigation is full of diffienlty, and I would
therefore relieve it of as much embarrassment as may be eon-
sistent with fair advocacy.

‘Worrell is no raving maniac, nor is his disease imbecility,
much less is he an idiot. We may safely avoid those forma
of insanity ag classified by authors, as not calculated to help
ua in our present inquiry. What then is the nature of his
insanity, if he be insane? His disease is of a nature which
presents the complication of epilepsy with irresistible insane
impulse. Irresistible insane impulse is called “homicidal in-
aanity,’”’ “moral inganity,’’ ‘‘monomania,”’ ‘‘mania without
delirium,”? by authors according to their respective ideas of
descriptive epithet. However named, it is the aame thing
and consists essentially in the loss of the power of volition
withont any very perceptible lesion of the intellectual facul-
ties, The perversion appearing most in the moral faculties,
the disease assumes necessarily a resemblance to crime, and

Related Posts