When the ‘corpus juris’ meets a corpus delicti: The appearance

And then: “We were coming back along the track. Mummy tripped on a plank and hit her head when she landed. She kept falling, and her head kept banging and bumping as she fell.”

“I’ll always remember her head banging”, cried Juliet dramatically.

While Mrs. Ritchie called her husband, the girls went to a sink to wash the blood off themselves, and Mrs. Ritchie heard them laughing hysterically as they did so. [84]
Medlicott ruminated carefully on why the girls were so self-contained, imaginative, selfish and unable to accept criticism, and he asserted that Juliet and Pauline were two people with similar mental weaknesses who suffered from delusions resistant to correction by exteriorized facts or reasoning. Consequently Dr Medlicott urged the view that Parker and Hulme should be viewed as certifiable victims of a folie à deux paranoia of the exalted type. Central to Medlicott’s full insanity diagnosis was what he perceived to be “the extraordinary similarity” of their murder with the Leopold-Loeb case [85] which concerned two mentally gifted Chicago law students and ‘thrill killers’ who, thirty years before, had also betrayed no remorse and who smiled in the courtroom during their trial. This linkage with the Leopold-Loeb case carried a risk which perhaps Dr Medlicott failed to recognize: that the boy-killers had also confessed to their heinous crime but that the folie à deux defence of Clarence Darrow and the alienists made no legal headway with the presiding Judge (Caverly J) who rejected it outright. (Perhaps Medlicott hoped that as Hulme-Parker was a jury trial he could better impress several jurors with this argument; the resistant stance of Adams J in wanting to withdraw this defence could not have been reasonably foreseen.) Helena Kennedy’s observation that “there is a high level of judicial scepticism about psychiatry” and that psychiatrists will come into courtrooms “like lambs to the slaughter if their reports are full of references to ‘cycles of deprivation’ or ‘cognitive dissonance’”[86] is a vital point to consider in assessing the rough ride meted out to Medlicott in 1954. In addition, Kennedy has suggested that Anglo-normative jurisprudence is reluctant to admit “that there is a potential for crime in Everywoman” so that “the investigation and trial of serious crime is not designed with them in mind”, as in the failure to design tighter rules about extracting uncorroborated confessions from vulnerable persons (as inarguably happened to Hulme and Parker) ; and yet, contradictorily, justice processes tend to stress emotional problems ( viz., that females “are mad rather than bad”[87]). This leads to a situation in which, “while women whose behaviour is ‘inappropriate’ are subjected to a misplaced psychiatric labelling, which must be challenged, there is also no doubt that the criminal justice system is misused as a dumping ground for women who should be patients rather than prisoners.” [88] It was Hulme and Parker’s singular misfortune to have fallen somewhere in the interstices between these powerful practices: from a sincere but probable psychiatric misdiagnosis and, consequent upon its failure as an exculpatory device to convince an all-male jury, to have been sentenced to a coercive rather than corrective/therapeutic regime as monsterized ‘lesbian outlaws’, in Jenni Millbanks’ evocative phrase.[89]
As far back as the Leopold-Loeb arraignment of 1924 much debate raged around the question of degrees of mental responsibility/irresponsibility short of legal sanity and, in their case, a dissociation between intellectual and emotional processes common to both youths led alienists to declare that both suffered from Dementia Praecox.[90] The ‘Joint Medical Report’(of defence psychiatrists White, Healy, Glueck and Hamill) stressed that Leopold and Loeb’s pathological “criminal activities were the outgrowth of a unique coming-together of two peculiarly maladjusted adolescents, each of whom brought into the relationship a long-standing background of abnormal mental life” which resulted in an abnormal mixing of fantasy with real life.[91] How unsurprising ,then, that their defence attorney Clarence Darrow described the murder of Robert Franks as “the scheme of disease”, the “scheme of infancy”, “the scheme of fools” and “the scheme of irresponsibility from the time it was conceived until the last act in the tragedy.”[92] It would be difficult not to see the direct applicability of this statement to the Hulme-Parker event, especially Darrow’s assessment that “Their coming together was the means of their undoing” and that this was “the act of two” – that “It was the act of their planning, their conniving, their believing in each other; their thinking themselves supermen.”[93] Central to the Leopold-Loeb defence was the thesis that neither individual could or would have committed such an atrocious actus reus alone but that it was uniquely generated and powered by their “weird, almost impossible...strange and fatal relationship.”[94]
The critical question which Heavenly Creatures lobs back at the trial is whether Hulme and Parker were portrayed – miscast actually – as ‘she-devils’, deadly examples “of all that is rotten in the female sex”[95]. If so, as I think they were, the New Zealand legal system failed them, Gothicizing them as vicious (if not depraved) sane killers who had bathed together, gone to bed together and made no effort to see HM Queen Elizabeth II on the first ever visit of a reigning monarch to the Antipodes. Indeed a Crown medical witness, Dr K.R. Stallworthy, stated to the court that he had no doubt that there had been a homosexual relationship between Juliet and Pauline (which, against his intentions, was viewed by the wider culture as criminogenic, despite a vehement denial of such a union from both women in after years), thereby paving the way for Crown Prosecutor Brown to make his ‘celebrated’ declaration in his summing-up: “These girls are not incurably insane. They are incurably bad.”[96] Technically Alan Brown was probably wrong in his second assertion: Hulme and Parker have certainly reformed and lead normal moral lives now, and the defence doubtless erred in proffering a full insanity claim. Medlicott (who spear-headed that diagnosis) was much closer to the mark when, in 1961, he noted how the ‘abnormality’ of Juliet and Pauline “was proportional to the time spent in one another’s company” and that they clearly “acted as resonators one on the other”. It was Medlicott’s error to concoct an ‘explanation’ of their deviance which coupled their obvious emotional immaturity and the problematic claim of homosexual inclinations (whether as a sincere diagnosis or as a tactic preying on the almost certain abhorrence of a jury of husbands, fathers and uncles towards, in this case, female sexual divergence), arguing that this unhappy cocktail “led to increasing arrogance, self-inflation or omnipotence [and] contempt for others…”[97] For, apart from Medlicott’s linkage between sexual inversion and criminality, he was accurate in observing that the girls “showed great exaltation which continued after the murders” and during their trial.[98] Doubtless this behaviour complicated any temporary insanity defence (if such was seriously entertained). Dr Medlicott insisted that in this case there was “no real question of inducer and inducee”; that their psychoses were identical and “It was a folie simultanee – a disturbance occurring in predisposed associated individuals” but which fell short of schizophrenia. [99] Checking years later with Bernard Glueck about Leopold and Loeb, Medlicott saw the parallel with 1954 when Glueck said he had no doubt that , intellectually, the young men understood the distinction between right and wrong but Glueck’s colleague in 1924, Dr William Alanson White, “felt that there was no adequate feeling attitude towards the wrongfulness of the act.” [100] Similarly, the defence in Hulme-Parker “contended that they were sufficiently disturbed by reason of mental disease to be unable to pass a rational judgment on the moral nature of their act.”[101] Medlicott later asserted that the prosecution feared a wide construal of the M’Naghten Rules and therefore spent “relatively little time” in cross-examination on such tricky points (which makes one assume that they were aware of Porter and Stapleton and did not want to risk opening up a temporary insanity ‘ escape route’ for the teen murderesses) ; instead the prosecutors tried to represent the girls as quite normal criminals driven by an adequate motive. (The miracle is that they succeeded in marketing such an obviously improbable hypothesis, surely a testament to the fervour of Cold War ‘moral panics’ and of New Zealanders’ seemingly innate conservatism, in the 1950s at least.) In his summing-up Adams J acknowledged that jurors might think that the girls appeared to be suffering “from some degree of mental disorder” and added the quite unexceptionable caution: “The question of course remains whether this abnormality of mind does or does not amount to disease of the mind” [102]. According to Medlicott, the judge later delivered a stupefying non-sequitur when he stated that “The law does not relieve persons of criminal responsibility merely because they are insane”.[103] It is clear that the matters raised in this paper were inadequately ventilated in Adams J’s courtroom if he was allowed to make this extraordinary statement unchallenged (alone it should have been the basis for appeal to the NZ Court of Criminal Appeal, given the case law from the 1930s and 1950s to hand in 1954 and also given the exculpatory parameters of s43(2) of the Crimes Act 1908 under which Adams J was to sentence Hulme and Parker).
Medlicott always insisted that Juliet and Pauline were self-judging individuals suffering from progressive and deepening ‘adolescent paranoia’, who acted out of ego-inflation, arrested emotional development (embodied in lesbian affect) and morbid illusions of omnipotence which amounted to a form of full-blown systematized delusional insanity. He might, for all that, have medicalized them in a more reductive manner than this over-driven Freudian analysis – as biologically-determined hysterics, whose internal organs drove them on to commit their appalling act of deviance. Margaret Anne Doody has drawn attention to a gynaecological text in the Hippocratic corpus, ‘About Virgins’, which (in her words) “shows that girls who have not yet conceived are thought of as dangerous creatures” – subject to delirium, epilepsy and suicidal impulses.[104] Doody argues that young undeflowered females were seen by the Greeks as “hysterical (from hyster, womb), since the unfilled womb tends to run around inside the body”, and she quotes Xenophon (in his Oikonomikos) to the effect that they are undomesticated (admés) savages who must be tamed by marriage. [105] Helena Kennedy, as a practising barrister and QC, has drawn attention to a central underlying problematic in British jurisprudence/jurisprurience: namely "Gothic descriptions of the devilish power of women.”[106] Kennedy cites one Hargrave J. Adams (from his book Women and Crime) asserting that, generally, “women have less willpower than men and therefore less self-control upon emergency.”[107] Yet the hypocritical double-standard at the heart of this discourse is revealed in the gender-blind quality of the law regarding provocation defences. Confuting Adams’ stereotype, Kennedy argues that “Women are much less likely to respond to provocation immediately” yet “the legal standards are built upon [male] ideas of instant ignition and a hotheaded rush to action. The spark has to be immediate, an assault which requires self-protection or a blow, a curse, an insult that goes to the core of a man’s being.”[108] Kennedy notes that judges try to conceive of parallel insults against women which may function analogously and I would suggest that an instance of this would be the Slander of Women Act 1891 (UK) which was upheld in the defamation action of Kerr v Kennedy [1942] 1 K.B. 409, which is authority for the legal principle that an allegation that a woman is a ‘lesbian’ is an imputation of unchastity under the aforenamed Act (or, in another reading, this case allowed that a false allegation of lesbianism is a valid ground for the tort of actionable slander).
In 1991 A.E.J. Fitchett insisted, correctly, that Dr Medlicott’s case was rejected but not refuted by the prosecution and argued that the jury, in making a determination of criminal guilt, did not necessarily believe the accused to be sane: