Valentine Shortis Is Not Guilty

As a juror, you must render a verdict of guilty or not guilty, and follow the law and do so based on your opinion from the evidence that has presented in court over the last several weeks on the case of Valentine Shortis (Friedland, 1986). After going over my notes from the trial numerous times, the verdict that I have chosen to write down on my ballot is “not guilty.” As a reader, you might not comprehend my reasoning for this vote that goes against all the odds of what the Crown has been trying to persuade me not to consider. I have analyzed all the evidence, and in my opinion, I believe that Valentine Shortis is an insane man, and has suffered from a disease of the mind since childhood. On the night of March 1st 1895, Valentine Shortis

He murdered two individuals in Valleyfield, Quebec. There is no question that he committed these crimes, but I do not believe that he was in the right state of mind or knew the difference between right and wrong.

Firstly, from the start of the trial the defence attorneys Greenshields and St. Pierre supported their plea of insanity by having four medical psychiatrists who are “experts in their fields and have over seventy years of experience combined” (Friedland, 1986, p. 93) working in the field with the mentally insane. They all had examined Shortis on countless occasions. After all their examination, they all rendered the same ruling of Shortis being a madman. Per Dr. Anglin, Shortis was crazy due to many factors which included having unintelligible speech, an unusual appearance when it came to clothing. Nonetheless, “he had many hallucinations both of sight and hearing. Shortis objected to being thought insane, a view often

There was “575 handwritten pages of statements made by forty-eight witness” (Friedland, 1986, p. 47) contesting that Shortis was in fact insane. There had been evidence from his childhood that his manic ways started in his adolescent years, he started to “light fires, beating horses, stabbing dogs, lighting a cat’s tail on fire, shooting at people in the streets and striking at children” (Friedland, 1986, p. 49) to name a few. Personally, when I heard the testimony of the witnesses from the commission, I thought what child at fourteen or fifteen years old, tortures animals, sets fires, and terrorizes people in the community daily would be sane minded. In my own opinion, just by hearing this alone Shortis had manic tendencies and those were only the beginning of monomania. Yes, at times throughout the trial the Crown made it clear that Shortis could converse with individuals and do simple tasks, but as Dr. Bucke testified “that many his patients could do ordinary tasks such as write a letter, filing documents, a copy things down” (Friedland, 1986, p. 86). These are all things Shortis did while working at the cotton mill and daily in his live. Just because Shortis manage to do this daily, does not mean he did not to do it off repetition. The authentication of these statements shows that even though Shortis committed wrongful acts in his