Cold Blood Receiving a Fair

¶ … Cold Blood Receiving a Fair Trial in Nonfiction Crime: Issues with the Defense in Capote's in Cold Blood In Cold Blood, the last major work by author Truman Capote, is often considered to be the first ever work of long-form true crime. Capote set out to write a magazine article on the brutal killing of a family in a small Kansas town by two career criminals who didn't amount to much separately, but proved a very lethal combination for the Clutter family.

What the author ended up with was several years of following the sensation of the crime and the ensuing trial, followed by the lengthy appeals process and eventual execution of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, the two men that had murdered a family in the middle of the night, after rousting them in a botched robbery (and possibly rape) attempt.

The issue of whether or not these men had actually committed the murders was in little doubt; Smith gave conflicting confessions in which he either ascribed some of the killings to Hickock or took the blame for all of the actual murders himself. The issue of their actual guilt, however, is somewhat in question. It is quite possible that Perry Smith was certifiably insane, possibly a paranoid schizophrenic.

This is what is suggested at various points in the proceedings as they are described in Cold Blood, but evidence of this was not allowed to fully surface at court. The mental capacity and capabilities of at least one of this duo, and possibly the only one who committed any real acts of violence, has a definite impact on the real guilt that these men bear for the murders, and on the scope and direction that their defense should have taken.

The issue of Smith and possibly Hickock's sanity and mental capacity during the commission of the crimes and during their defense is only one of several issues affecting the fairness of the trial that these two men received.

The length of the defense's case when compared to that of the prosecution and the potential bias of the judge presiding over the trial, not to mention the degree of effort that Hickock had to put into receiving an appeal, all suggest that two men did not receive the fair and equal justice to which they are entitled under federal and state laws.

Some of this was correctable by Smith and Hickock's defense attorneys, while some of this unfairness was (and in some aspects still is) inherent to the system, and it also must be remembered that in Cold Blood is far from an objective rendering of the case or the facts pertaining to it, but all in all some suggestions can be made based on the information presented in this book as to providing a more fair trial for these two defendants.

The Problems The primary problem, as stated above, was the lack of a real presentation during the trial of evidence regarding the mental competency of the defendants, and especially of Smith. Under the rules of the court, all that the psychologist that had examined Smith and Hickock was allowed to testify to was whether or not the defendants were capable of telling right from wrong at the time they committed the crimes for which they were being tried.

Replying that he could not be certain about Smith, the psychologist is prevented by the judge from providing any further detail to the jury, though Capote makes sure his readers see it (Capote 267). There is also ample evidence in the book that Smith is indeed severely unbalanced, if not an outright paranoid schizophrenic.

During the trial, he notes of Herb Clutter, the patriarch of the family that Smith slaughtered on the same night he first met them, and whom he vaguely attempted to reassure as he tried to rob the man's house, "I wasn't kidding him. I didn't want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat" (Capote 244).

This kind of statement shows the general mental and psychological state that Smith maintained during the crime and the trial, yet the judge would not let such evidence be presented and effectively asks for the death penalty in his final instructions to the jury, following the close of the defense's case. This case took only a day to unfold, as well, compared to the week that was taken up by the prosecution's admittedly far more substantial (due to a lack of presentable psychological evidence) case.

Possible Solutions There is arguably little that could be done for either the rules barring the presentation of real psychological evidence during the trial or the bias that the judge showed (at least in Capote's rendering of the trial) against the defendants. The defense attorneys attempted to present mitigating psychological evidence that would at least have eliminated the death penalty from the list of applicable punishments in the all but certain case of a guilty verdict, and were prevented form doing so both by this rule and by the judge.

There was admittedly very little else to the defense's case, as the commission of the acts was not a matter of dispute. Both the issue of the barred psychological evidence and the judge's bias were adequate grounds for immediate appeal, however, and Smith and Hickock's defense attorney's failed to.