Addititionally there is ample evidence in the book that Smith is indeed severely out of balance, if no outright paranoid schizophrenic. During the trial, this individual notes of Herb Mess, the patriarch of the family that Johnson slaughtered on a single night this individual first achieved them, and whom he vaguely attemptedto reassure as he tried to rob the man’s property, “I had not been kidding him. I don’t want to harm the person. I thought he was a very great gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment We cut his throat” (Capote 244). This sort of statement displays the general mental and internal state that Johnson maintained during the crime plus the trial, yet the judge would not let this sort of evidence always be presented and effectively requests the death penalty in the final recommendations to the court, following the close of the defense’s case. The case took only a day to unfold, too, compared to the week that was taken up by the prosecution’s undoubtedly far more substantial (due to a lack of look good psychological evidence) case.
Conceivable Solutions
There exists arguably small that could be performed for either the rules barring the presentation of real psychological data during the trial or the tendency that the judge showed (at least in Capote’s manifestation of the trial) against the defendants. The security attorneys attempted to present excuse psychological evidence that would at least possess eliminated the death fees from the list of applicable punishments in the basically certain case of a accountable verdict, and were prevented form doing this both by this rule and by the evaluate. There was admittedly very little different to the defense’s case, because the commission rate of the functions was not a matter of question.
Both the issue of the banned psychological evidence and the judge’s bias were adequate reasons for instant appeal, yet , and Jones and Hickock’s defense attorney’s failed to go after these remedies with satisfactory vigor. Hickock spent years reading legislation books and writing to varied groups in attempts to obtain assistance for fighting appeals on their behalf, and though he was ultimately somewhat good in by least acquiring some aid if certainly not in truly avoiding the death fees, his first attorneys should have done more to fight for their defendants than was accomplished (Capote). It is unclear whether further character witnesses would have recently been permissible if testifying for the general mental state and attitude of the two defendants, yet such account could have been used to lengthen the defense’s circumstance and make their level about the mitigating factor of an clear psychological disruption and a disconnect from your standard landscapes of morality and appropriate human actions. The protection attorneys do have their hands largely tied up by the legal and sociable circumstances in the trial, but they did not carry out everything in their power to support their defendants, either during the trial or perhaps particularly later on.
Conclusion
Hindsight makes it easy to guage the security attorney’s in this instance; all of the challenges fought fro these two defendants were finally losing kinds, and possibly rightfully so. The fundamental concept of the American justice system, however , is that many people are entitled to a reasonable trial, no matter how heinous their particular acts may be. Failing to supply this makes the