Delmas’s Unwritten Law
The right of any red-blooded male to kill anyone who fools around with his wife, daughter, mistress or other female near and dear, and then to escape punishment by pleading temporary insanity - a right rarely extended to women in analogous circumstances.
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The unwritten law has been invoked many times but most famously, in American legal history, in 1907 by Delphin Delmas, a California lawyer (”the little Napoleon of the West Coast bar”) who was hired by Harry K. Thaw’s mother to defend her playboy son for having murdered the nation’s leading architect Stanford White.
The woman in this instance was Evelyn Nesbit, Thaw’s wife and previously White’s mistress. (La Nesbit generally is remembered as ‘The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing’ - the swing being a prominent and apparently well-used appurtenance of White’s penthouse apartment in New York’s original Madison Square Garden, a building that he had designed.) Madly jealous of her previous lover, Thaw walked over to the architect’s table at the Garden’s rooftop dining theatre on the night of June 25th 1906 and shot him dead.
Almost everyone who knew Thaw or was connected with the case, including the district attorney who prosecuted him, thought he was profoundly crazy and should be consigned to a mental institution. When brought to trial the following year, however, Delmas tried to save Thaw from both asylum and prison by arguing that his client had been in the grip of a temporary insanity which he termed “dementia Americana, the unwritten law.” The little Napoleon pulled out all stops:
“If Thaw is insane, it is with a species of insanity that is known from the Canadian border to the Gulf. If you expert gentlemen ask me to give it a name, I suggest that you label it dementia Americana. It is that species of insanity that inspires every American to believe that his home is sacred. It is that species of insanity that persuades an American that whoever violates the sanctuary of his home or the purity of his wife or daughter has forfeited the protection of the laws of this state or any other state.”
The jury deadlocked after forty-seven hours, seven members concluding that Thaw was sane enough to be convicted for murder, while five voted for acquittal. At a second trial, however, enough evidence of Thaw’s irrationality dating to boyhood was presented to persuade that jury to acquit him on grounds of insanity. Thaw spent most of the next fifteen years (with time out for one escape and one brief release) in the Mattewan State Asylum for the Criminally Insane (now known more blandly as the Correction Center for Medical Services). He died in 1947.
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