Word: lonergans
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...Wayne Lonergan's young-old face seemed older as he rose to hear the verdict. ("Guilty of murder in the second degree") which ended the homosexual's trial for strangling his wife. Lonergan faced a sentence of from 20 years to life. The state had tried for a first-degree (electric chair) conviction. Before the jury reached its decision, cigar-gnashing Lonergan Counsel Edward Broderick explained why he had not put Lonergan on the stand: "I saw the weaknesses in the state's case." Lonergan's conviction was also a legal milestone in the life...
Defense Attorney Broderick asked the medical examiner: "Did you remove the calvarium [Patricia Lonergan's] by sawing from the superior orbital regions to the inferior occipital regions...
...psychotics were in the courtroom. As the Lonergan trial got under way-Novelist James Thomas Farrell (The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, TIME, Feb. 19, 1934) was having trouble with the Manhattan police. His publisher (Vanguard Press) was visited by four different parties of cops who professed to see a connection between Wayne Lonergan and Studs Lonigan. Later a cop from a prowl car tried shyly to buy a copy of the novel from a First Avenue bookshop. It was out of stock...
Psychopathic Personality? The de fense may also try to prove that Lonergan is a psychopathic personality - and hence perhaps even legally insane. One Manhattan psychiatrist claims that this is shown by Lonergan's "financial promiscuity, sexual promiscuity, emotional shallowness." Typical example of his emotional shallowness : after his wife's death Lonergan went back to the apartment to leave a toy elephant for his son. He was unstable, seldom held a job for long. One of his few recorded jobs was chair pushing at the New York World's Fair. Example of his psychopathic unscrupulousness: his marriage...
Irresistible Impulse? Psychiatric treatment sometimes "cures" homosexuality especially when it is not congenital. Psychopaths rarely improve under any treatment. A psychopath is, by definition, a person who is usually unable to resist impulses. The defense may try to prove that Patricia Lonergan led a lively life herself, that since Lonergan is a psychopath, his impulse to kill her was irresistible. In the U.S. 24 States do not allow an irresistible impulse as a defense, 18 do. Five, including New York, allow it only if the impulse "be so strong as to ob literate the notion of right or wrong." Insanity...