Michele Rotunda. A Drunkard’s Defense: Alcohol, Murder, and Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth-Century America.

Abstract

Michele Rotunda’s A Drunkard’s Defense explores alcohol-related defenses in nineteenth century homicide trials in the United States. Since the success of such defenses relied on “a blend of legal, medical, and popular perceptions” of the effects of intoxication, Rotunda focuses on medical and legal treatises, journal articles, and judicial decisions, and contextualizes them in reformist and popular culture (91). A Drunkard’s Defense traces the emergence and uneven success of the defense that alcohol use lessened an individual’s responsibility for lethal violence. Until the 1820s, the claim of drunkenness was almost never considered a factor mitigating crime since becoming drunk was considered a voluntary act. The early nineteenth century saw the movement toward recognition that the habitual use of alcohol might be involuntary and that alcohol’s effects were more complex and less predictable than had earlier been thought. The first significant cases in which alcohol-related defenses succeeded, in the 1820s, were actually claims that the perpetrator was in the throes of delirium tremens: a temporary derangement while sober that had been induced by previous heavy drinking. Unlike intoxication, the drinker had not sought and anticipated delirium tremens. While many juries were unconvinced by the increasing consensus among medical authorities that delirium tremens was a legitimate and exculpatory form of insanity, by the 1830s that defense had gained some traction.