ARGUMENTS
255
And his book speaks to us with disquieting force on psychiatry and the
law-Mr. Capote may not tell us to what end he delved so deep into
the Clutter killings, but he thoroughly impresses upon us the small
progress our society has made in solving the legal problems posed by
criminals like Smith and Hickock. And certainly
In Cold Blood
has a
healthily unsettling effect on some of our easier assumptions about social
and human causality.
What-Mr. Capote asks us-are we to do about our psychopathic
murderers: kill them ; put them in prison; put them in hospitals?
Although little approval is now given to capital punishment for any
class of criminal, it still exists in the majority of American states. But
let us suppose--hopefully-that soon this form of punishment will every–
where
be
abolished (and the movement for its abolition can only
be
forwarded by Mr. Capote's harrowing description of a hanging: it took
twenty minutes for Hickock to
be
legally strangled), what then do we
do with our Smiths and Hickocks? Obviously they cannot be let free in
society. Shall it then be prison or hospitalization?
If
prison, rehabilita–
tion is hopeless. But so too, in the case of murderers like Smith and
Hickock, is psychiatric cure virtually hopeless in our present state of
therapeutic knowledge. What distinguishes these cold-blooded killers,
Smith, Hickock, the young Andrews who was with them in the death
row, from at least some persons who commit crimes of passion is their
incapacity to feel remorse for their crimes. Where there is no guilt for a
murder, there is nothing to stop further killings--psychiatry as yet knows
no way to inculcate,the capacity for remorse, of sufficient strength to be
counted on as a restraint of action, in someone lacking this human
dimension. It may scarcely seem practical to commit incurable criminals
to
hospitals for the rest of their lives; but this is what we do with
incurable noncriminals who cannot live in society, and to make a
distinction between the two categories, criminal and noncriminal, could
only mean that it is punishment and not protection of others which
guides our conduct.
.
But there are even knottier problems than this which Mr. Capote's
'book brings out of the professional parish where they usually stay hidden
from general view. Not only has the law not discovered a proper dis–
position of the incurable criminal, it has not yet devised a reliable
method for separating out the offender who is susceptible of cure from
incurables like Smith and Hickock. The legal sanity of these two men
was tested by the M'Naghten Rule which still obtains in most states,
not only in Kansas. In accordance with this Rule, which asks but a
single question, whether the defendant was able to distinguish right from
wrong at the time of the crime, Smith and Hickock were clearly able
