“How far gone are they?”

“That’s what we’re trying to determine,” Dr. McNarry said, somewhat brusquely, and Uncle Gerald subsided. McNarry had just come from talking to Judd about his philosophy. The philosophy itself he dismissed as a mere camouflage, just a smattering of things Judd had read. (As Willie Weiss reported it to me, “a mishmash”.)

But all these philosophies of Judd’s, Eli Storrs observed, tended in one direction – paranoia. “Look how the mind seizes what it needs!” Like his tests, they proved that Judd was emotionally a child.

“That’s interesting,” McNarry said. “You could interpret Nietzschean omnipotence the same way. It belongs to the magic phase.” This was the phase in which the infant, by crying, discovered that everyone around him would do what he wanted. And had this phase ever ended, for Judd?

Suddenly beginning to understand, Uncle Gerald remarked, “Why, Max told me that kid didn’t even lace his own shoes until he was fourteen years old. He’d have the nursemaid do it.”

He had felt there was “something wrong” with the boys, but now, suddenly through his own story about lacing the shoes, he saw the doctors’ meaning. Something in him was saying, Why, it’s really true! What we’ve been claiming is really true. All the better.

The psychiatrists had moved on to a discussion of Artie and his game of “detective”. Artie had offered Allwin the explanation that he still played it only because he had to have a game he could play with his little brother Billy. But to Dr. McNarry, Artie had no longer rationalized the childish game. He had told of playing it with Judd, and even when he was alone, walking through the streets, imagining he had accomplices with him, giving them hand signals. Dr. McNarry added, “I believe he even built it up for me; he’s cunning.”

“No, he really does it!” Uncle Gerald broke in. “Why, a year ago last fall he shadowed me all the way home one night. He came up behind me when I got to my house – he had a black handkerchief tied around his face like a real hold-up man – and he said, ’stick ‘em up!’ Of course I knew it was Artie and I just told him to run along home.”

“That’s very interesting,” the alienists were saying to him; but to Uncle Gerald the whole case was now coming into focus. Just now, the alienists had made him see that it was a wild child inside of Artie, an ungrown child that could not yet fully understand the difference between right and wrong, that had dictated Artie’s behaviour. But could the alienists make an ordinary jury understand this complicated mechanism?

The Feldschers, with Max and James, had come in, and now the discussion expanded, yet always kept returning to the main point: How could you make a jury see that the boys were “functionally disturbed”?

“We’ll have to make it stronger,” Uncle Gerald insisted.

“Well, you can’t claim that he has completely lost contact with reality,” Dr. McNarry pointed out. “Don’t forget there will be psychiatrists on the other side.”

The very thought of this started McNarry off on his pet tirade. For McNarry couldn’t understand how any psychiatrist could bring himself to testify for the prosecution: The entire aim of psychiatry was to unravel the causes of behaviour. And if all behaviour had a cause, where was guilt? How, then, could any doctor become a prosecutor?

“At least you and Jonathan Wilk believe the same thing,” Ferdinand Feldscher said. “But what jury does?”

McNarry shook his head. He had only the gloomiest view of making a jury see it, in this case. For every jury had to act as a sample of the society from which it was drawn. This was inevitable, it was the very heart of the jury system. “What you will get is the herd critique through the medium of the jury.”

He reminded them of several cases in his own experience, cases in which insanity was self-evident. There was the Father Schmidt case – a priest who had cut a woman into seven parts, on the altar. Yet the jury had declared him sane, in order that he might be hanged. “Juries invariably regard the insanity plea as a dodge. They discredit the experts.”

What, then, was to be done?

What about Wilk? Uncle Gerald reminded them that, after all, Wilk was the greatest jury lawyer in the world. Surely he could make a jury see it. Even one juror would be enough.

Wilk had gone to bed with a cold; the entire group moved into his bedroom.

It was then that Edgar Feldscher revived the thought of going to a judge with a plea of guilty.

His brother said, “I’ve never ruled it out, in my mind. But all you’ve got is a plea for mercy on the grounds of their youth.”

“No,” said Edgar, tentatively. “Why couldn’t we present the entire psychiatric evidence, as we would before a jury?”

The others looked at him as though he had forgotten his ABC’s. If a judge could be convinced of insanity, he was bound to call a jury.

“Yes, yes, but short of insanity-”

Wilk’s head had lifted. “Mitigating circumstances,” he croaked hoarsely, pulling himself up to a sitting position. “A judge is duty bound to listen to mitigating facts.”

“Yes, but how can you raise the question of their mental condition, in mitigation, without coming to the question of insanity? And the minute you touch on that…”

It was indeed the paradox, and McNarry did not hesitate to express his lifelong disgust with this curious situation in which a jury of laymen, the persons least equipped for it, were always the ones who had to decide whether a person was insane.

Uncle Gerald had a thought. “All right, suppose a judge does at some point call a jury. We’re no worse off. In fact, we’re better off, because this already shows the judge doubts their sanity.”

It was an impressive point. “And then, we’ve still got Jonathan, here, before a jury,” said Ferdinand Feldscher.

“We’re not doing this as a show for me,” Wilk said.

Edgar Feldscher drew them back to the original idea. “We don’t have to raise the insanity issue, temporary or anything. We claim they are suffering from a functional disorder, short of a psychosis. These boys are not responsible for their behaviour-”

“Who is?” Wilk interjected.

“And if we are careful to keep the argument short of insanity, isn’t it a mitigating condition?”

It would be a thin line to tread – to convince the judge that they were sick, but not sick enough to be called insane. The doctors would have to avoid the very word.

“Don’t worry,” said McNarry. “It’s not really a medical word. I never use it if I can help it.”

“There’s one thing I like about this plan,” said Max Steiner. “It’s honest to plead guilty. It’s the plain truth.”

Wilk drawled, “It’s no easier to make people believe the plain truth than a lie. But I suppose it is always more comfortable.”

Uncle Gerald was still uncertain. It was so risky to rest everything on one man instead of twelve.

“He’s a good man,” Wilk commented.

“He’s never hanged anybody,” Ferdinand Feldscher said.

And so they agreed, but with one condition. “We’d better make sure how the boys feel about it.”

Wilk wanted to see for himself how they reacted. Artie nervously agreed. They knew best. Judd had a touch of resistance. Pleading guilty, didn’t that mean merely going up to be sentenced? Then the case would never really be heard?

No, Wilk assured him; in the mitigating evidence, everything would be heard. All his ideas would be heard.

Thus it was that the defence made the astonishing announcement of a change of plea. In a quick, unspectacular hearing, the boys were brought into court, to declare themselves guilty.

The Hearst papers were the most blistering. So even Wilk was afraid to go before a jury! And then Mike Prager carried an “inside” story. The defence case had collapsed, he declared on “good authority”, because the thousand-dollar-a-day alienists for the defence refused to declare the boys insane.