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The William Freeman Murder Trial: Insanity, Politics, and Race |  | Author: Andrew W. Arpey
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Seller: Academic Book Source
Rating:  1 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 224
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 0815607911
Dewey Decimal Number: 345.73025230974768
EAN: 9780815607915
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Product Description
In 1846, William Freeman, a young man of African and Native-American descent, stabbed to death four members of the white Van Nest family with no apparent motive, leading to the first insanity plea in New York State's history. This account reconstructs the crime, its context and implications.
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| Customer Reviews:
Racism Northern Style June 16, 2004
P. Nagy (Chapel Hill, NC USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The William Freeman Murder Trial: Insanity, Politics, and Race by Andrew W. Arpey (Syracuse University Press) Antebellum culture is compellingly exposed in this book of horrific multiple murder and madness in Upstate New York. Andrew W. Arpey offers insight into a wide variety of subjects that will have broad appeal to historians and scholars of law, journalism, religion, psychiatry, politics, and race and reform.
In 1846 William Freeman, a young man of African and Native American descent, stabbed to death four members of the Van Nest family with no apparent motive. His victims, all of whom were white, included an elderly woman, her pregnant daughter, and her two-year-old grandson. Free-man was quickly apprehended, but his mental health soon became a matter of controversy. Led by future Secretary of State William H. Seward, his counsel entered a plea of insanity, one of the first uses of the insanity defense in the nation.
The Van Nest killings and the trial of William Freeman, though illustrative of many aspects of antebellum society and culture, have never received in-depth attention. Drawing on newspapers, trial accounts, and private papers, Arpey firmly shows the political machinations of the case, the heated debate it set off on the relation-ship between race and crime, the use of punishment, and the boundaries of legal responsibility. His superb reconstruction of the trial, the motivations of the many actors, and the trial's status in American history place this book alongside the best crime novels of its kind.
Excerpt: On Friday, March 13, 1846, the editor of the Albany Evening Journal received details, via telegraph from Utica, of a `Most Horrible Murder' that had taken place the previous evening. The earliest details of the bloody scene were shocking, and were made all the more terrifying by the fact that the perpetrator was still at large... . Freeman's arrest did not result in an immediately satisfactory answer to the question being asked across the state: Why did this man kill violently this particular family? That the victims included a pregnant woman, a two-year-old child, and an elderly woman made the crime seem incomprehensibly brutal and bizarre. . . . In Auburn, local residents of `every class and sex' flocked to the county jail to cast their eyes upon Freeman. ... The brutality of the killings and Freeman's bizarre behavior following his capture thrust his mental health into question.... Anger and suspicion regarding the man in custody for the atrocities committed at Fleming only increased with time. `Since his confinement he has endeavored to convince him [sic] that he is insane, by talking to himself, saying that they were asleep that he killed, and using all sorts of incoherent expressions,' the Rochester Daily Advertiser reported several days after Freeman's arrest. . . . Suspicion that Freeman feigned insanity was not surprising. To many, insanity seemed but a clever conspiracy concocted by crafty lawyers to spare their depraved clients appropriate punishment."
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