Our posting yesterday (HERE) on the arraignment of the (former) Appleton fire lieutenant on murder charges included his plea of “temporary insanity.”  In other words, he was crazy for a few hours but he’s ok now.  The court is having him evaluated before the judge decides whether to allow that plea to be permitted.  The insanity plea is scoffed at by many people as a lawyer’s trick and is presumed, due to the publicity that they always receive, to be a fairly common defense.  In practice, however, the insanity defense is used in less than 1% of all court cases and is only successful in 26% of  those, according to a study done by a legal research team.

The “temporary insanity” claim dates back to 1859 when it was first used by a U. S. Congressman from New York, Daniel E. Sickles, in Washington, D. C.  His wife was having a love affair with a popular man-about-town, Philip Barton Key.  Philip was the son of Francis Scott Key, now noted as the author of the U. S. national anthem, and like his father he was a prominent attorney.  At the time in question he was serving as the U. S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.  A bachelor, he was known as a “ladies’ man” and had been wooing Teresa Baglioli Sickles, the young wife of the Congressman who was unaware of the affair.  Perhaps it was because he had his own list of peccadillos that kept him busy between sessions of Congress.

But one day Sickles received an anonymous letter telling him of Key’s close interest in his wife and he confronted her with the accusation.  She broke down under his questioning and admitted the affair and even (probably under duress) wrote out an entire confession outlining all that she had done with Key.  Enraged, Sickles awaited Key’s next visit to their home which was right across the street from the White House, facing Lafayette Park.  As he watched out the window, Sickles observed Key outside giving the secret signal for assignation by waving a handkerchief.  Instead of finding Teresa, though, he was met by a furious Daniel who promptly pulled out his pistol and shot the 41-yr.-old Key, mortally wounding him.

Harpers’ Weekly depiction of the murder.

As you can well expect, the murder and the subsequent trial of a famous Congressman became the hot topic of the year nationwide.  Sickles’ attorney used the insanity defense for his client.  The trial carried on for an unusually-long 20 days and was a sensation as Teresa’s descriptive letter was read out in court.  At the conclusion of the trial, Daniel Sickles became the first person in the U. S. to ever be acquitted for murder by reason of insanity.

Sickles later was made a general in the Union Army during the Civil War and was wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg.  His creative and successful lawyer in the trial was none other than Edwin Stanton, the powerful politician who later became President Lincoln’s Secretary of War.  The murder trial was attended and documented by a court reporter, Felix G. Fontaine, and his complete transcription was published in a 63-page book.  The entire book has been scanned and posted online by Google and if you have the inclination you can read it and follow the entire juicy trial HERE.

But not until after we get this equipment checked out.  You’ll excuse me while I go start a couple of fresh pots.  This may take a while.

Allow me to play the prognosticator this morning.  With the current economic “re-adjustment” sorting out the viable businesses from the ones that are pretty shakey at best, I’m going to give you a head start on the next “really big” corporation to go under.  Actually (there’s that word again!), they’ve been failing for 20 years now and the only reason you still see their signs up and sales going on inside their stores is because, like General Motors, they are were just so huge that they kept lumbering along on the strength of their size despite their lousy performance.

But like all elephants, GM wandered off to a clearing and fell over – dead forever – the victim of seriously poor management and business decisions that accumulated over the past 40 years.  And this next elephant that is going to land with a jungle-shuddering crash is – - – Sears, formerly known as Sears, Roebuck and Co.

The mighty retail giant that once had stores in every city, town and hamlet in the country and literally owned the catalogue retail-sales market is just as dead as GM.  How could that be?  As I said, they are so large and have always been around and still fill the Sunday papers with those thick, slick sales booklets.  But like GM they thought their success was due to who they were and stopped paying attention to what they were doing to change with the times.  And leadership lost track of what their customer base was doing.

In the 1960′s Sears decided that the future for them was large stores in shopping malls.  And while it was wise to join the new style of shopping that was taking place in the more heavily populated areas, they made the big mistake of shutting down their small stores and catalogue outlets in the tiny towns and market centers across the country, leaving millions of their customers having to look somewhere else for their dry goods.  Compounding their mistake, they directed their sales efforts to concentrate on clothing, forsaking their big-ticket base of appliances, tools and home products.  They still had them, but put a lot less floor space and effort devoted to them.  The mall stores were big, but 80% of the floor space was clothing racks.

And as they were vacating the town square, Sam Walton’s Walmart stores were moving right in as Sears’ dust was still showing down the highway.  Who’s running up the big profits nowadays, eh?  In an unsuccessful attempt to get back into the “neighborhood,” Sears bought out the bankrupt K-Mart chain a few years ago, but all they got was a shopworn brand and a bunch of stores in places where people weren’t shopping anymore.  And now even the malls are ghost towns.

And don’t forget the catalogue.  The mighty Sears Catalogue where you could find anything and everything you needed.  Pots and pans, linoleum flooring, live puppies, furniture and, in the early part of the 20th century, houses.  Order a new home and a few days later four trucks would show up stacked with pre-cut, marked lumber.  By the end of the week you had a two-story, 3-bedroom house ready to move into.  I could fill two pages with how they screwed up their catalogue department, starting with their silly policy of only giving you a catalogue after you made at least two purchases from it in a 6-month time span.  Meanwhile, places like L. L. Bean were filling everybody’s mailboxes with free, unsolicited catalogues.  So guess who got the mail-order business?

Yep, those are just two of the several costly decisions that Sears made leading to their downfall.  And now that consumer spending on non-essential items has plummeted, Sears’ bones are showing and soon, very soon, they will wander off to their little clearing and fall over.

But we’ve got to make sure our stuff keeps working, so let’s get this equipment checked out now.  I’ll go make some more coffee.  We’re going to need it.

This situation in Oklahoma between the highway patrolman and the paramedic has really gotten ridiculous.  If you haven’t been following the story on STATter911, then you should have because practically every day another bomb gets lobbed into the fray.  I presume you already know about the original incident and have seen the videos showing the out-of-control trooper having a public meltdown.

After an unnecessarily-long wait the OHP put the trooper on admin. leave while the district attorney investigated the incident.  And he finished his report by admonishing the OHP for failing to be forthright in their public releases.  And now the trooper himself appears to be fearful that his job is in jeopardy because he went out to the gutter and brought home a gasbag lawyer who specializes in personal destruction.  He immediately held a very vocal press conference and accused the 30-yr. paramedic of being “… a menace to the community.”  Classy move there, Calhoun. 

Then he handed out copies of a photo of his badge-heavy client that appears to have been taken in the men’s room at the Greyhound depot showing a bruise on his arm.  Golly!  He’s banking on the fact that most people are unaware that if you line up any 100 policemen chosen at random, then probably at least 90 of them will have a bruise on their arm at any given time.

Yesterday’s chapter in the saga had the paramedic, Maurice White, Jr., going on national television to declare that the trooper “… needs to have the ability to carry a gun and a badge taken away …”

While this food fight is entertaining to the 30-second sound-biters on the network news, this is going to have a very destructive outcome for both the OHP and the Creek Nation ambulance corps.  The leaders of both of those organizations should have stepped in by now and put a stop to it.  Period.  Their deafening silence on this (weak leadership?) has allowed the controversy to spill out into the tabloid world of publicity and it is now under the control of the feuding lawyers who are trying to get their clients exonerated in the court of public opinion.  That is not good.

If you’ve missed any chapters in this soap opera, catch up on all the episodes at STATter 911 HERE.

That’s after we get the equipment checked out.  I’m late with the coffee, so I’d better hop to it before I get anymore bruises on my arms.