UNKNOWN

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 216, 20 August 1887, Page 8

UNKNOWN

The Court of Assize of the department of Indre-ct-Loire has been trying a young bookbinder for the crime of assassination. It happens that the culprit had been, during one period of his life, a " subject M (if certain eminent magnetisers ; and had, indeed, himself practised the art which some persons regard as based upon legitimate science, and which others are beginning to regard as a revival of the "black magic" for which men and women used to be burned and hanged. In its details the alleged otlenee was of the most ordinary kind. But it is noteworthy by reason of the action taken, not only by the culprit's advocate but by the legal authorities. It was assumed that the accused had been led to the crime With which he was charged par Vnbruthsemeni —by die results of his subjection to magnetism ; that those persons who had experimented upon him were the really guilty parties, and that their practices had overthrown his moral equilibrium. Tn etiect, the defence was a revival, it; the nineteenth century and in enlirh 1 ' • u Franco of the theory of diabolic \ < - oss>ion, which should logically have treated the experimentalists. as° vizards meriting capital punishment, and. the actual murderer a.s their victim. It is not strange, of course, that the defenceshould set up such a theory : there is na limit to the absurdities which have been set up as defences since the days when tho lateSir Fitz-oy Kelly defended a prisoner on the ground that his victim had been catingr apples, and that the prussic acid contained in the pips might have prove*? fatal. But that the prosecution should havo accepted such a theoiy on behalf of the State is a real triumph for those who are attempting s to set up theories of moral irresponsibility— who arehere, no less than in France, disposed to treat criminals as victims. It is thus the more satisfactory that tho common sense of the jury refused to be misled by what foolish people call psychology, and found the murderer guilty— guided to their verdict, no doubt, by the view that if "magnetism " be admitted as an extenuating circumstance, no murderer could ever be found guilty.