1 May 1920
ADVOCATES CHANGES IN LUNACY LAWS
Grand Jury Urges That Persons Committed Elsewhere Be Adjudged Insane Here.
FAVORS MEDICAL BOARD
In Event Offender Is Guilty, It Thinks Verdict Should Be “Guilty, but Insane.”
While a commission in lunacy yesterday was examining Thomas W.
Simpkin, who shot and killed Dr. James Wright Markoe April 18, at St. George’s
Church, Stuyvesant Square and Rutherford Place, the April Grand Jury submitted
recommendations to Judge Mulqueen in General Sessions advising changes in the
laws relating to the trial and imprisonment of the criminally insane. Part of
the jury’s statement to the court reads :
“The record in this case discloses the fact that Thomas W. Simpkin, who shot and
killed Dr. Markoe, escaped from an institution for the insane at Fergus Falls,
Minn., in the Summer of 1919. So far as is known no attempt was made to
apprehend him or inform the country of his escape and ask for his detention if
found in a sister State. This may be due to the fact that a prisoner adjudged
insane in one State is not insane in any of the other States of the Union.
“The Grand Jury, therefore, recommends to the Legislature of the State of New
York that the law be so amended that an escaped lunatic, who has been lawfully
committed by the laws of a sister State to an institution for the criminally insane
or an institution for the insane, be adjudged presumptively insane, if
apprehended in the State, until the escaped lunatic can show by competent and
legal testimony that he is sane.
“In this connection the Grand Jury also urges such institutions to make a
careful and extended search for any of their escaped inmates and do everything
within their power towards their capture.”
“One of the changes in the law recommended by the jury would provide that “a
petty jury at a trial may find the defendant, if a lunatic, is guilty of the
crime and is also insane, and that its verdict should be guilty but insane,”
instead of the present legal form of “not guilty, but insane.”
In place of the present commission in lunacy, as legally defined, consisting
usually of an attorney, a physician and a layman, the Grand Jury further
recommends that this law be changed to provide for the establishment of a body of
medical insanity experts, whose sole duty it would be to pass upon questions
that are now within the province of a lunacy commission. A more drastic and
uniform law by the States with reference to the purchase of revolvers and other
weapons was also advised.
The April Grand Jury was not concerned officially in any way with the case of
Simpkin. The commission examining Simpkin, which will continue its work today, is
composed of William Travers Jerome, Dr. Marcus R. Hayman and William F. Cox.