Charles Guiteau was the second man to kill an American President and the first to answer for it before a civilian court. On July 2, 1881, in Washington, he attacked President James A. Garfield, early in his presidency. The President lingered through the summer and died at Elberon, New Jersey, on September 19, 1881. Guiteau never denied the act. What he denied was responsibility for it: God, he insisted, had pressed him to "remove" the President, and his lawyers told a jury that he had been insane all his life.
The trial in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia ran from November 14, 1881, to January 25, 1882, and it became the most closely followed insanity case of its century. More than twenty physicians testified on the state of his mind. The judge gave the jury the English rule on criminal responsibility, which asked whether the accused understood the nature of his act and knew that it was wrong. The jury deliberated for about an hour and found him "guilty as indicted." He was sentenced to death on February 4, 1882. The court sitting in general term denied him a new trial, a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States refused to free him on habeas corpus, and the new President declined to intervene. Guiteau was executed in Washington on June 30, 1882, two days before the first anniversary of the assassination.
Charles Julius Guiteau was born on September 8, 1841, in Freeport, Illinois, the fourth of six children. His father worked at the local bank and had once served as clerk of the county court; the family was comfortable without being wealthy. His mother died on September 25, 1848, when he was seven, and an older sister largely raised him. That sister later remembered a boy who was very late learning to speak and who seemed to be in constant, excited motion. Evidence at his trial described a father who beat the boy for his strangeness and his speech, and who held unusual religious convictions of his own, among them a belief that he would never die. The defense would later point to the father's beliefs as proof that insanity ran in the family.
In 1859 Guiteau used an inheritance of $1,000 from his maternal grandfather to enroll at the University of Michigan, over his father's objections. He was slow to make friends and left after about a year. In June 1860, at nineteen, he did as his father wished and joined the Oneida Community in upstate New York, a religious commune whose founder taught that people could perfect themselves and live free of sin. His father revered the founder. The son did poorly there. Acquaintances found him moody and self-absorbed, he earned a reputation for idleness, and the community's members gave him a mocking nickname.
In April 1865, convinced that God had chosen him to spread the founder's teachings, he left for New Jersey to start a religious newspaper, The Daily Theocrat. It failed within months, and in July 1865 he applied to rejoin the commune. On November 1, 1866, he left for good, tired of the manual labor and the criticism, and bitter about money he believed the founder owed him. He wrote letters demanding its return, brought a lawsuit against the community and lost it. The founder, for his part, told Guiteau's father that his son was a lunatic.
By 1867 Guiteau was in Chicago, where his sister's husband, an established real-estate lawyer, offered him a place in his office. He studied law in the office of another attorney, who in place of a formal examination sent him to a state prosecutor. The prosecutor asked three questions, one of which Guiteau answered wrongly, and recommended his admission. He was licensed in Illinois in 1868. The prosecutor who examined him and the lawyer who trained him would both reappear at his murder trial, one for the defense and one for the government.
His practice, first in Chicago and then in New York, consisted largely of arranging bail and collecting debts, and he often kept the money he collected. He spent a short time in jail in New York for failing to pay the rent on his office. When a New York newspaper suggested that he could not be trusted with client funds, he sued it for $100,000 and soon had to drop the case.
In 1869 he married a librarian at the Young Men's Christian Association. The marriage was unhappy, and she divorced him in 1874 after years of abuse and instability. In the summer of 1872 he campaigned for Horace Greeley's presidential candidacy and asked, without result, to be made minister to Chile. In 1875 he tried to buy a Chicago daily newspaper and could find no one to lend him the money.
That year, with his career and his marriage behind him, he went to stay with his sister and her husband in Wisconsin. After a violent episode there, the family's physician judged him insane and recommended that he be committed to an asylum. He left before that could happen.
From about 1877 he lived as an itinerant religious lecturer, moving from town to town, often without paying his fare, and leaving unpaid bills at hotels and boardinghouses across the Midwest and the East. He self-published a book, The Truth: A Companion to the Bible, much of which was borrowed from the Oneida founder's writings, and tried to sell it on the road. Few people came to hear him. After surviving several close calls on his travels, he became convinced that God was watching over him and had marked him for greatness.
In 1880 Guiteau turned to politics. The Republican Party was split between the Stalwarts, who wanted Ulysses S. Grant nominated for a third term, and the supporters of former Speaker James G. Blaine. Guiteau attached himself to the Stalwarts, moved to New York and wrote a speech titled "Grant against Hancock." When the convention passed over both factions and chose a compromise candidate from Ohio, Guiteau kept the speech almost as it was and put the nominee's name in the title. He tried repeatedly to be taken on as a campaign speaker, and he delivered the speech once, to a small audience in New York. It impressed no one, but Guiteau told anyone who would listen that he had swung the election.
He believed the new administration owed him an office. A few days after the inauguration in March 1881 he came to Washington, where he moved through a series of respectable boardinghouses without paying his bills. He wrote to the President again and again, sat for days in the reception rooms of the Executive Mansion, and was granted a single brief audience, at which he asked to be made consul in Paris. In January he had written to the President-elect about a post in Vienna. He called so often at the State Department that the Secretary of State finally told him never to speak to him again about the Paris consulship. That rebuff came on May 14, 1881. Letters he wrote to the President and to two Secretaries of State survive in the records of the Department of State at the National Archives, among its files of letters of application and recommendation for the years 1877 to 1885.
The President whose favor he sought had a very different history. He had been born into poverty in Ohio and lost his father at the age of two. He worked his way through Williams College in Massachusetts, became a professor and then president of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (later Hiram College), and read law. In the Civil War he won a victory at Middle Creek, Kentucky, in 1862 and rose to brigadier general. He left the army for the House of Representatives in 1863 and served there until his election as President eighteen years later. In 1866, in his first appearance in any courtroom, he argued successfully before the Supreme Court of the United States in Ex parte Milligan, the case that held military commissions could not try civilians where the regular courts were open. At the 1880 convention he had not been a contender; he emerged as the compromise candidate when the two factions deadlocked, and he defeated the Democrat, Winfield Scott Hancock, in November.
As President he refused to let the Stalwart leader, Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, control federal patronage in his state, and the quarrel paralyzed the Senate through the spring of 1881. Conkling resigned in protest. Guiteau read the dispute as proof that the Secretary of State had captured the administration and that the President had betrayed the men who elected him. By mid-May he had settled on the idea, which he insisted was a divine inspiration, that the President must be "removed" so that the Vice President, a Stalwart, could reunite the party and save the country from civil war. He wrote out his reasons in an address to the American people, dated June 16, 1881. In the weeks that followed he followed the President around Washington, and at least twice he turned back.
On July 2, 1881, in Washington, Guiteau carried out the attack. He was arrested on the spot and taken to the District jail, as he had planned. Fearing a wider conspiracy against the government, the commanding general of the army ordered troops into the streets and set soldiers to guard the jail against a lynch mob. More than one attempt was made on Guiteau's life while he was in custody, one of them by a guard.
The President lived for eleven weeks. In early September he was moved to the New Jersey shore to escape the Washington heat, and he died at Elberon on September 19, 1881. The Vice President took the oath of office the next day. Guiteau, who was at first distraught at the news, soon recovered his composure and wrote to the new President to say that his inspiration had raised him from a political cipher to the head of the nation.
He had been held without charge all summer. Five days after the assassination, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia had announced that no formal proceedings would begin until the President either recovered or died. Through those weeks the prosecutor took depositions and gathered evidence, gave interviews in which he declared Guiteau "no more insane than I am," and let the Chicago lawyer who had once trained Guiteau visit him in the jail and report back on their conversations. The Attorney General brought in two outside lawyers to strengthen the prosecution: the leading member of the District of Columbia bar and a former judge of the New York Court of Appeals who was among the best-known trial lawyers in the country.
Guiteau's brother-in-law, the Chicago lawyer who had once given him a place in his office, happened to arrive in Washington on business soon after the arrest. With the prosecutor's permission he met Guiteau in the jail, and, urged on by his wife, he agreed to defend a relative he had long believed to be insane. He had spent more than thirty years at the bar, almost none of them in criminal law. He told the prosecutor that he could not let the government hang an insane man.
On September 28, 1881, the prosecutor began proceedings before the grand jury and issued subpoenas for witnesses. On October 8 the grand jury of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia returned an indictment against Guiteau for the murder of the President. It ran to eleven counts. All of them charged murder, and most were redundant; some gave contradictory accounts of the facts, an approach meant to cover every turn the trial might take. One count alleged that the President had died at once, which was untrue but anticipated the argument that the crime had not been committed in the District at all, since the death had occurred in New Jersey.
The marshal served the indictment, with the lists of jurors and witnesses, on October 11. Guiteau was arraigned on October 14. His brother-in-law told the court that the defense would rely on insanity and asked for time to gather witnesses, and the judge set the trial for November. Because defense counsel was unfamiliar with criminal practice in the District, he asked the court to appoint local counsel, and on October 26 the judge appointed a young Washington attorney to serve alongside him.
The trial began on November 14, 1881, before an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia sitting in the criminal term. It began badly for the defense. The court-appointed local counsel, apparently without the knowledge of his client or his co-counsel, asked for a continuance so that a more experienced lawyer could take his place, and refused to say who that lawyer was. Guiteau demanded that the case go forward, and so did his brother-in-law. The judge, who said he wanted no appearance that the accused was being hurried to his death without a fair trial, proceeded to choose a jury.
That took three days and the examination of 175 men. Nearly every one of them knew the case, and many said they had already made up their minds. The judge allowed men with opinions about the case to serve but excused those who said no evidence could change their view, and he let counsel question each prospective juror rather than conducting the examination himself. The panel was complete on November 16: a restaurant keeper, a retired businessman, a machinist, two plasterers, an iron worker, two grocers, a cigar dealer and three merchants. One of the twelve was African American, seated over Guiteau's objection.
The prosecution opened its case on November 17. It did not need to prove that Guiteau was sane, because in the District the burden lay on the defense to establish insanity, so the government's lawyers concentrated on the crime itself. They called thirty-one witnesses, the Secretary of State chief among them, and laid out the sequence of events, the defendant's own written record of his preparations and, wherever they could, his long history of petty fraud. The government rested on November 21. The same day the court-appointed local counsel left the case after a public falling out with Guiteau's brother-in-law over the direction of the defense.
Throughout, Guiteau refused to stay silent. He insisted on acting as one of his own lawyers, and the judge, after first ordering him to speak through counsel, came to tolerate his interruptions. At the end of the case the judge explained why: the defense was insanity, and the jury needed to see the man whose mind it was asked to judge. The prosecution seems to have reached the same view, if only to keep any conviction safe on appeal. The Attorney General later told the President that Guiteau had been allowed more latitude than any defendant in the recorded history of the law. Public opinion ran the other way. Much of the country thought the judge far too lenient, and the courtroom gallery filled every day.
From the start the defense was divided against itself. Guiteau's brother-in-law built his case on hereditary insanity. He called dozens of relatives and acquaintances to describe a man who had been strange from boyhood, who could not hold to any occupation, and who had grown steadily more deluded. Guiteau's sister, the lawyer's own wife, testified to the family history. One witness was the former Illinois state's attorney who had examined Guiteau for the bar; he described a rambling address Guiteau had once given in a petty larceny case in Chicago, began advising the defense after his testimony, and on December 23 joined it as co-counsel.
Guiteau hated this defense. He did not want to be called a lunatic, and he interrupted again and again to insult his brother-in-law for suggesting it. He offered a theory of his own: that he was a sane man who had acted under the pressure of a command from God. He drew a line between "legal insanity," which he was willing to claim, and "actual insanity," which he called an insult. He took the stand from November 28 to December 2 and gave a long, detailed account of his life, his years at Oneida, his politics and the weeks of prayer in June 1881 in which, he said, his inspiration had become certain. His memory for dates and details was strong, and the prosecution later turned that against him. On cross-examination the former New York judge pressed him on the commandment against killing, and Guiteau answered that divine authority had overcome the written law. Near the end of the trial he allowed that he would not do it again for a million dollars, with the mind he had now.
The defense also sought the testimony of the new President, whom Guiteau constantly called his friend and expected to pardon him. Counsel served a subpoena; the prosecutors argued that a sitting President could not be compelled to testify. The judge never ruled on the question. The parties agreed to written questions instead, and on December 8 the President returned brief answers to six of them.
The medical testimony split along a fault line in the science of the day. The older, orthodox view held that insanity was a disease of the brain that changed a person, a departure from his own normal way of thinking and acting; a man with a lifelong record of strange or dishonest behavior was simply a bad man. A newer school, stronger in Europe than in America, held that some people were born unable to grasp right and wrong.
The defense put its case to most of its experts as a long hypothetical question: assume a hereditary taint of insanity, a mind so deranged at about thirty-five that the man was fit for an asylum, five years of symptoms that many observers took for madness, and then, in June 1881, an honest conviction of divine command that overpowered his will. Most of the experts agreed that such a man would be insane. A Chicago neurologist testified that a person could be insane without delusions or hallucinations, and damaged himself on cross-examination by estimating that one adult in five was or would become insane. The defense's strongest witness, a New York neurologist, was the one expert who examined Guiteau in person and was willing to call him insane outright, without hypotheticals; he described him as a "moral monstrosity." When the government tried to discredit him by noting that he had once taught at a veterinary college, he gave a tart reply and the attack went no further.
The government called more than sixty witnesses in rebuttal, among them more than a dozen physicians who testified that Guiteau was sane. Lawyers and clients he had cheated and boardinghouse keepers he had left unpaid described his life as a long record of selfishness rather than madness. The commanding general of the army testified to rebut the idea that Guiteau's note to him was a sign of insanity. Political men described the hunt for office as an ordinary feature of the spoils system. The Chicago lawyer who had visited Guiteau in the jail told the jury that Guiteau had talked at length about his political motives and had never mentioned divine pressure or inspiration. One prosecution physician testified that there was no such disease in science as hereditary insanity. The jail's physician called Guiteau perfectly sane; another called him sane, though eccentric. The government's last and most important witness was the longtime superintendent of the state asylum at Utica, New York, and editor of the American Journal of Insanity, who testified that Guiteau was deeply depraved but not insane, because he had shown too much reason and planning. Testimony closed on January 4, 1882.
For two days the lawyers argued over the instructions the jury should receive, and on January 10, 1882, the judge ruled. On insanity he chose the rule laid down in M'Naghten's Case, which he described as the general rule in most of the states, and he largely accepted the government's statement of the law. The alternative tests the defense had in mind, he reasoned, gave jurors too little guidance and left them "liable to be swayed by all the wild theories which ingenious counsel have made use of from time to time to secure acquittal and defeat the ends of justice." He allowed that the law might have to change as medicine learned more, but said that in the present state of that science it was at least debatable whether the rule needed modification.
He also ruled against the defense on jurisdiction. The former state's attorney had argued that because death is an element of murder, a District court could try the crime only if the victim had both been attacked and died there. The judge acknowledged two early decisions of the District's former court that seemed to apply such a rule, but he traced the old English doctrine behind them to the long-abandoned practice of summoning jurors from the neighborhood of a crime for their knowledge of the facts. He held that jurisdiction was complete where the fatal act had been committed.
The closing arguments began on January 12 and lasted almost two weeks, Saturdays included, filling nearly 500 pages of the printed transcript. The leading member of the District bar opened for the government with a simple case: the defendant was sane and wicked, moved by vanity rather than madness or God, and to excuse him as an eccentric would invite every unbalanced man to kill for party purposes. The former state's attorney answered for the defense by retracing Guiteau's life and asking the jurors whether they would not call such a man mad if they met him in their own lives; he begged them not to condemn a man to death on the opinion of doctors. Guiteau's brother-in-law spoke for five days, one of the longest addresses ever made to a jury in the District's criminal courts. He went over the evidence point by point, accused the prosecutors of combining to condemn a man they knew to be insane, and mocked the idea that only a lesion of the brain could prove madness.
The judge at first refused to let Guiteau address the jury himself. Guiteau passed his speech to a reporter, a New York newspaper printed it, and the United States Attorney then withdrew the government's objection rather than leave any ground for reversal. Guiteau spoke on January 21. He repeated that God had inspired the act, that he was neither a wicked man nor a lunatic, and that the best people in the country were coming around to his view. The former New York judge closed for the government with a long attack on the defendant's character.
The judge charged the jury on January 25, 1882. He reminded the jurors of the constitutional protections that had been extended to the defendant, and he left no doubt that the only real question was the state of the defendant's mind. "An irresponsibly insane man," he told them, "can no more commit murder than a sane man can do so without killing." The defense of insanity had been so abused that it was viewed with suspicion, he said, but if it was established it was "a perfect defence to an indictment for murder, and must be allowed full weight."
Then he gave them the test in the words the case is remembered for:
"[T]he true test of criminal responsibility, where the defence of insanity is interposed, is whether the accused had sufficient use of his reason to understand the nature of the act with which he is charged, and to understand that it was wrong for him to commit it; that if this was the fact he is criminally responsible for it, whatever peculiarities may be shown about him in other respects; whereas, if his reason was so defective, in consequence of mental disorder, generally supposed to be caused by brain disease, that he could not understand what he was doing, or that what he was doing was wrong, he ought to be treated as an irresponsible person."
He told the jurors that the burden rested on the defendant who set up insanity as an excuse. On Guiteau's own defense he drew a careful line: "Unquestionably a man may be insanely convinced that he is inspired by the Almighty to do an act, to a degree that will destroy his responsibility for the act. But, on the other hand, he cannot escape responsibility by baptizing his own spontaneous conceptions and reflections and deliberate resolves with the name of inspiration." The only safe rule, he said, was to ask whether the prisoner, whatever his singularities, had the mental capacity at the time of the act to know that it was wrong, or had been deprived of it by mental disease. He set before them the two portraits counsel had drawn, the cunning and vain swindler and the deluded child of a diseased family, and told them it was for them to decide which was the accused. If they found him insane, he said, they should say so in their verdict; if not, "the act is simply murder, and it is your duty to find him guilty." He declined two further instructions the defense requested on the ground that they raised questions of fact for the jury.
The jury retired that afternoon and returned about an hour later. The foreman announced the verdict: "Guilty as indicted, sir." At the defense's request the clerk polled the jurors, and each of the twelve answered "Guilty." The verdict, as defense counsel later pointed out, meant in form that Guiteau stood convicted on all eleven counts, some of which contradicted one another. The court gave the defense four days to file a motion for a new trial and a motion in arrest of judgment, and discharged the jury.
The court heard the defense's motions to set aside the verdict on February 3 and 4, 1882, and rejected them. On February 4 the judge asked Guiteau whether he had anything to say. Guiteau told the court that he was not guilty of the charge set out in the indictment, and that the act had been God's and not his. The judge then pronounced the judgment of the court: "that you be taken hence to the common jail of the District of Columbia, whence you came, and there be kept in confinement, and that on Friday, the 30th day of June, in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and eighty-two, you be taken to the place prepared for your execution within the walls of said jail." He told Guiteau that any error committed to his prejudice could be corrected in the general term. Defense counsel entered an appeal at once.
The District of Columbia had no separate appellate court until 1893. Appeals in criminal cases went to the general term of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, a panel of its justices sitting in banc. The general term heard Guiteau's appeal on May 9, 1882, and decided it on May 22.
The appeal, argued by the former Illinois state's attorney, rested mainly on jurisdiction. The court held, as its headnote put it, that "murder is committed within the District of Columbia when the felonious blow is struck here, notwithstanding the consequent death happen without the District." One justice wrote separately on the history of Maryland's common and statute law, which the District had inherited at its creation. The court also rejected the argument that the federal statute of 1790, which punished murder in any "district of country" under the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States, could not reach a District that did not exist when it was passed. The District's courts had long tried murder under that statute, and the court reasoned that Congress had written it in anticipation of the new seat of government.
On the remaining points the court found no error. The trial judge had refused to tell the jury that a man who knew an act was wrong but lacked the power to resist it might still be insane; the general term held that "the evidence in the case did not call for any ruling upon the point made, and that no error has intervened in this matter." The defense had objected to the testimony of Guiteau's former wife, who said she had never seen signs of an unsound mind in him; the court held that this disclosed no confidential communication between husband and wife, since sanity is not a matter of choice, and said, "We are of opinion that no error was committed in receiving this evidence." The defense had also argued that the sentence was void because the date fixed for execution violated section 845 of the District's Revised Statutes, and the court found "no error in this action of the court." Its judgment was unanimous: "A new trial is therefore denied, and the judgment of the court is affirmed."
Before 1889 the Supreme Court of the United States had no appellate jurisdiction over most federal criminal cases, but a federal prisoner could petition for a writ of habeas corpus on the ground that the court that convicted him had lacked jurisdiction. Guiteau's counsel did so, and the petition was heard by a single Justice of the Supreme Court. On June 19, 1882, in a chambers opinion, the Justice held that the District's court had jurisdiction. The statutes of Maryland in force when the District was created in 1801, he reasoned, made a murder triable where the fatal act was committed even if the death occurred elsewhere, and that rule had passed into the law of the District. He declined to refer the case to the full Court: "Prompt action is one of the beneficial characteristics of the remedy of habeas corpus, and is due both to the prisoner and to the administration of justice." He concluded, "The application is denied." That ended the case in the courts.
A group of physicians, joined by the secretary of the National Association for the Protection of the Insane and the Prevention of Insanity, asked the President on June 22 to appoint a commission to examine Guiteau's mental condition and to grant a reprieve while it did so. The Attorney General advised against it on June 23, writing that the question of sanity had been "the main and only issue" at a long, fair and public trial, and that granting the request would substitute the President's will for the judgment of the law. On June 24, 1882, the President, Chester A. Arthur, announced that he would not intervene.
Guiteau still believed the full Supreme Court might hear him in January 1883, and he wrote to the President asking to be allowed to wait until then. Charles Guiteau was executed in Washington on June 30, 1882.
The Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, despite its name, was the trial court of the national capital. Congress created it in 1863 to replace the old Circuit Court of the District, with a chief justice and three associate justices; a fifth seat was added in 1870 and a sixth in 1879, and the justice who presided at Guiteau's trial was the first appointed to it. Its judges held office during good behavior under Article III of the Constitution, yet the court also heard the kind of cases that elsewhere went to state courts, murder among them. It worked through terms: any single justice could sit in the criminal term, and a party aggrieved by a ruling there could appeal to the general term, a panel of the court's justices. The general term was the appellate stage that denied Guiteau a new trial. The court's appellate work passed to the new Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia in 1893, and the court itself is now the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
The murder charge rested on section 5339 of the Revised Statutes, the codified form of the federal crimes act of 1790, which punished murder committed in any fort, arsenal, dockyard or magazine, or in any "place or district of country under the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States." The court's power to try it came from a separate statute giving it jurisdiction over crimes "committed within the District." The defense's whole jurisdictional argument lay in the gap between those words and the fact that the President had died in New Jersey. The judge, the general term and the Justice who heard the habeas petition all closed that gap the same way, by holding that the crime was committed where the fatal act was done.
The insanity rule the judge applied had come from England. After the acquittal in M'Naghten's Case in 1843, the law lords stated a test under which a defendant was excused only if mental disease left him unable to understand the nature and quality of his act or to know that it was wrong. A Massachusetts judge adopted the rule in a murder charge in 1844, and most state courts followed. By 1881 it was under attack. Some courts allowed acquittal where an insane "irresistible impulse" drove the act, and in 1870 New Hampshire's highest court adopted a broader test, asking only whether the crime was the product of mental disease. Defense counsel built his evidence with both alternatives in mind, and the judge rejected both because they gave jurors too little guidance. The District's courts later used the product test in the mid-twentieth century before moving to the American Law Institute standard.
Whether Guiteau was insane in the medical sense is a question the jury did not have to answer and the verdict did not settle. The jury decided only that he had failed to prove legal insanity under the test the judge gave them: that he understood the nature of his act and knew it was wrong. It rejected both the defense's theory of lifelong hereditary insanity and Guiteau's own claim that a divine command had compelled him. Later physicians, scholars and historians have argued that he was in fact insane, and medical opinion shifted that way within a few years of the execution.
His own account of his motive was never consistent. At trial he spoke of pressure from God; the Chicago lawyer who visited him in the jail testified that in those conversations he had spoken only of politics. In a single letter he wrote that he had no ill will toward the President and, within a few sentences, that the President must die for wrecking the party. The judge told the jury that a political theory of justification, however sincerely held, was no defense.
The verdict itself carried an oddity that defense counsel pointed out. Because the jury found Guiteau "guilty as indicted," he stood convicted in form on all eleven counts, although some of them described the facts in ways that could not all be true.
September 8, 1841: Charles Julius Guiteau is born in Freeport, Illinois.
1859: He enrolls at the University of Michigan on an inheritance and leaves within a year.
June 1860: He joins the Oneida Community in New York.
April 1865: He leaves to found a religious newspaper, which fails; he returns in July.
November 1, 1866: He leaves the Oneida Community for good.
1868: He is licensed to practice law in Illinois.
1869: He marries; his wife divorces him in 1874.
1875: A family physician recommends that he be committed to an asylum; he leaves first.
About 1877: He begins work as an itinerant religious lecturer.
1880: He writes and once delivers a campaign speech for the Republican ticket.
March 1881: He comes to Washington seeking a consulship.
May 14, 1881: The Secretary of State rebuffs him.
June 16, 1881: He writes an address to the American people explaining his plan.
July 2, 1881: The assassination of the President in Washington; Guiteau is arrested.
July 7, 1881: The United States Attorney says proceedings will wait on the President's recovery or death.
September 19, 1881: The President dies at Elberon, New Jersey.
October 8, 1881: An eleven-count murder indictment is returned in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia.
October 14, 1881: Guiteau is arraigned.
November 14, 1881: The trial begins.
November 16, 1881: The jury is completed after 175 men are examined.
November 28 to December 2, 1881: Guiteau testifies.
December 8, 1881: The President answers written questions from the defense.
January 4, 1882: Testimony closes.
January 10, 1882: The judge rules on the insanity test and on jurisdiction.
January 12, 1882: Closing arguments begin.
January 25, 1882: The judge charges the jury; the verdict is "guilty as indicted."
February 4, 1882: Motions to set aside the verdict are rejected and Guiteau is sentenced to death.
May 9, 1882: The general term hears the appeal.
May 22, 1882: The general term denies a new trial and affirms the judgment.
June 19, 1882: A Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States denies habeas corpus.
June 23, 1882: The Attorney General advises against a reprieve.
June 24, 1882: The President announces he will not intervene.
June 30, 1882: Charles Guiteau is executed in Washington.