Word: pierson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...jittery, harmless-looking little man in steel-rimmed spectacles was accused of murder, and he had long since confessed. Now, after four days of testimony and five hours of deliberation, the jurors had reached a verdict. They found the defendant, Howard Pierson, 49, not guilty by reason of insanity...
Thus last week in Austin, Texas, ended a murder trial that had been delayed for 28 years while the State of Texas waited, with inexhaustible patience, for Howard Pierson to recover his reason...
...Pierson's belated acquittal was likely to contribute to a legal controversy that has raged for more than a century: What to do with the criminal who is not mentally responsible for his crime? Pierson had shot his father and mother one April night in 1935 and, after briefly protesting his innocence, he admitted the murders and his motive. His parents, he said, stood in the way of his plan to save mankind by means of a "cosmic-ray microscope" of his own conception. He showed no contrition...
Penalties in Time. But modernizing the law may involve more than modernizing the definition of insanity. In many states, court procedures governing the criminally insane are also being overhauled. After Howard Pierson's 1935 confession, he was brought to court, not to determine whether he was deranged while committing his crime, but to decide first whether he was men tally competent to defend himself against a charge of murder. The court ruled that...
Ironically, Texas criminal law changed more rapidly than did Howard Pierson's mental health. Since his commitment to the state hospital in Austin, the state has enacted a new statute. Un der the new law, Pierson's insanity at the time of the murder would have been determined by a jury at a preliminary trial. Had that jury decided as the jury did last week, Pierson would not have been tried again...