Image: Charles Julius Guiteau in 1881. (Public Domain)

On this day in history, November 14, 1881, Charles Guiteau was put on trial for the assassination of U.S. President James Garfield. Charles Guiteau’s murder trial was one of the first held in which the defendant’s assertion of insanity was exposed to the modern legal test: whether Guiteau understood that his actions were criminal.

On July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau shot twice at Garfield while the president headed for a Williams College reunion.

For almost three months, Garfield lay in the White House, mortally wounded and near death. Doctors were incapable of locating the bullet in his back. On September 19, 1881, Garfield, age 49, died from an infection and internal bleeding. He was buried in Cleveland.

Once Garfield died, Guiteau was formally charged on October 14, 1881, on a charge of murder, which earlier had been attempted murder after his arrest. Guiteau pleads not guilty to the indictment. The trial proceeded in Washington, D.C., on November 14, in the Supreme Court for the District of Columbia. Although Guiteau insisted on representing himself during the entire trial, the court-appointed Leigh Robinson to defend him. After a week of trial, Robinson quit the case. George Scoville took over as lead counsel for the defense. While Scoville’s legal specialty lay in land title examination, he had married Guiteau’s sister and was therefore obligated to defend him in court when everyone else refused.

Guiteau’s trial was the first high-profile case in America where a defense based on the contention of temporary insanity was used. Guiteau vigorously maintained that while he had been legally insane at the time of the assassination (because God had removed his free will), he was medically insane, which was one of the major causes of the conflict between him and his defense lawyers.

The defense hired Edward Spitzka, who, as a psychiatrist, was a top alienist, to testify as an expert witness to bolster the insanity defense. (An alienist is a now-outdated term for a psychiatrist or psychologist specializing in determining a patient’s sanity for legal purposes, now the field of forensic psychology.) Spitzka believed that “Guiteau is not only now insane, but he was never anything else.” While on the stand, Spitzka affirmed that he had little doubt that Guiteau was insane and “a moral monstrosity.” He came to the determination that Guiteau had “the insane manner” he had so often seen in asylums, adding that Guiteau was a “morbid egotist” with “a tendency to misinterpret the real affairs of life.” He felt the sickness resulted from a congenital brain malformation.

The district attorney of the District of Columbia, who was also on the prosecuting team, detailed the prosecution’s opinion of Guiteau’s insanity plea in a pre-trial assertion that also reflected public opinion about Guiteau:

            “He’s no more insane than I am. There’s nothing mad about Guiteau: he’s a cool, calculating blackguard, a polished ruffian, who has gradually prepared himself to pose in this way before the world. He was a deadbeat, pure and simple. Finally, he got tired of the monotony of deadbeats. He wanted the excitement of some other kind and notoriety… and he got it.”

Guiteau became a media phenomenon during his trial for his peculiar actions, which included him repeatedly cursing and insulting the judge, the prosecution, most of the witnesses, and even his defense team, as well as organizing his testimony into epic poems which he narrated at length and soliciting legal advice from arbitrary observers in the audience via distributed notes. He recited his autobiography to the New York Herald, ending with a personal ad for “a nice Christian lady under 30 years of age.” He was ignorant of the American public’s extreme dislike of him, even after he was nearly murdered twice. He often smiled and waved at observers and reporters in and out of the courtroom. Guiteau sent a note to General William T. Sherman, asking that his troops immediately take possession of the jail to secure his release. He explained that assassinating the president was merely a ‘political necessity.’ Sherman responded: “I don’t know the writer. Never heard of him or saw him to my knowledge.”

Guiteau sent a message that he reasoned that Arthur should free him because he had just raised Arthur’s salary by making him president. Guiteau argued that Garfield was killed by medical malpractice, not by the bullets; “The doctors killed Garfield, I just shot him. Throughout the trial and until his execution, Guiteau was accommodated at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C.

In the end, Guiteau planned to begin a lecture tour after his perceived impending release and to run for president in 1884. He was found guilty on January 25, 1882, and sentenced to death.

After the guilty verdict was given, Guiteau moved forward, despite his lawyers’ efforts to quiet him. He bellowed to the jury, saying, “You are all low, consummate jackasses!” plus further curses and obscenities before he was taken to his cell to await execution. Guiteau appealed his verdict, but the appeal was rejected.

On June 30, 1882, Guiteau was executed in the District of Columbia, just two days before the first anniversary of the shooting of Garfield.

While led to his execution, Guiteau was said to have continually smiled and waved at spectators and reporters. He scandalously danced to the gallows and greeted his executioner. On the scaffold, he delivered a “last dying prayer” in which he declared that God “did inspire the act for which I am now murdered” and predicted that “This government and this nation, by this act, will incur Thy eternal enmity,” adding that “Thy divine law of retribution will strike this nation and my murderers.” He also condemned President Arthur as “a coward and an ingrate “whose thanklessness to the man that made him and saved his party and land from overthrow has no parallel in history.”    

As per the appeal to the executioner, Guiteau signaled that he was ready for death by dropping the paper. After he finished reading his poem, a black hood was placed over his smiling head, and within moments, the gallows trapdoor was released, the rope breaking his neck immediately with the fall. Guiteau’s body was not given to his family, as they could not afford a private funeral, but it was autopsied and buried in the corner of the jail yard. During his autopsy, it was found that Guiteau suffered from a condition known as phimosis, an inability to retract the foreskin, which at the time was believed to have caused the insanity that led him to assassinate Garfield.        

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