The Criminal Brain: Understanding Biological Theories of Crime

1. Introduction: Crime, History, Science

1 1 Introduction Crime, History, Science The Van Nest murder case of 1846, while unique in its tragic details, illustrates many of the issues typically raised by biological explanations of crime. The killings occurred in an isolated farmhouse on the shore of one of New York’s Finger Lakes, on a March evening just as the seven members of the Van Nest family and their hired man retired to bed. Someone slipped into the house and butchered the farmer, his pregnant wife, his elderly mother-in-law, and his two-year-old son, whose small body was eviscerated by the knife, leaving several feet of intestines dangling from the wound. Within days the authorities arrested William Freeman, a man in his early twenties of African and Native American descent. Freeman confessed to the massacre, although he was never able to clearly explain why he had singled out the Van Nests. At times he suggested that he had been revenging himself for an earlier wrongful imprisonment (a case in which none of the Van Nests had been involved) and at others that he “had no reason at all.”1 While still in his teens, William Freeman had been sentenced to five years in prison for horse theft—a crime for which he was evidently framed by the actual thief, a far more sophisticated man. In any case, Freeman maintained his innocence, and as he served his time in New York State’s formidable Auburn Prison, he became increasingly bitter about the conviction, especially as he was cruelly flogged for rule infractions. But he showed no signs of mental peculiarity until after an altercation with one of the prison’s keepers. When ordered to strip for a flogging, Freeman instead attacked the keeper, who struck back, hitting the prisoner so hard on the head with a wooden plank that the board split. From then on, Freeman suffered from deafness and an inability to think clearly. He deteriorated mentally to the point of becoming (one eyewitness reported) “a being of very low, degraded intellect, hardly 2 Introduction above a brute.”2 On release, Freeman sought the arrest of the people who had had him locked up; when he got nowhere with that approach, he started planning another sort of revenge. His determination to right his wrongs may have come to include the Van Nests because when he sought work at their homestead shortly before the massacre, the farmer had declined to hire him. Freeman’s arrest triggered a ferocious debate that became typical of cases in which an appalling crime is attributed to biological abnormality. In the majority were the local citizens who initially tried to lynch Freeman and then demanded that he be legally hanged. These included members of a first jury, which determined that Freeman was “sufficiently sane in mind and memory, to distinguish between right Freeman stabbing Van Nest child. Unknown artist, commissioned about 1846 by traveling showman George J. Mastin. Note the child’s dead father in the doorway. The Mastin murals reflected public horror at the massacre of the Van Nest family; at the same time, they inflamed sentiment against the black assassin of the white family. Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York. Introduction 3 and wrong,”3 and of a second jury, which found him guilty of the crime. “Many of the voices that screamed for retribution,” writes Andrew Arpey in his book on the Freeman case, “did not hesitate to cite the killer’s race as a source of his depravity.” The other side included a local clergyman, who, observing that the community treated its black population as outcasts, asked, “Is not society in some degree, accountable for this sad catastrophe?” Freeman’s brother-in-law agreed, claiming that white men’s mistreatment turned his people into “brute beasts.”4 A former New York State governor, William H. Seward, and his law partners volunteered to defend Freeman, arguing before the two juries that the prisoner was insane (“unable to deduce the simplest conclusion from the plainest premises”)5 and thus not responsible. Seward managed to get a stay of execution and, eventually, an order for a new trial, for which he enlisted the assistance of a number of physicians and psychiatrists, including Dr. Amariah Brigham, superintendent of the local lunatic asylum and one of the country’s leading authorities on insanity. But Freeman, having declined mentally to the point of idiocy, died before the...