Lizzie Borden Society Forum

If Lizzie had been convicted, do you think she would have gotten the death penalty? And if so, would it have been hanging or the electric chair?

Hosea Knowlton was very anti-death penalty. I don't think he would have went after it with her.

augusta--at first I thought you were joking about the electric chair, then I looked it up and found it was first used in 1890. Scary!

Lizzie was lucky there was the Victorian Lady card to play.

She could have been hung. Robinson mentions it in his closing argument.

I can't believe that they ever would have though. I think she would have been committed to some mental asylum had she been found guilty, whether they thought her crazy or not. If it was a man he would have been hung.

my impression is that it was robinson's strategy to at least make the jury believe that to find her guilty would mean taking her life -- which, he argued that they could not do without proof that she actually did it.

Yes, nb, the electric chair was around then. But did Massachusetts use it at that time?

An asylum. That's good, Harry. For some reason I hadn't thought of that. Did Jennings ask Lizzie about an insanity defense and she refused? I know her plea was 'not guilty', but wasn't that discussed and Lizzie was emphatic about not using that?

It was the prosecution that was going around asking people about Lizzie's sanity, wasn't it?

Good point, Haulover.

The fact that the death penalty was a possibility is one of the reasons I have a hard time buying the Billy Borden did it/The boyfriend did it theories. I doubt Lizzie would have risked hanging for Billy B. And what kind of "boyfriend" would take that kind of chance with the women he supposedly loved? He would have to have been a psychopath to have risked it.

What is a psychopath?A

psychopath is defined as having no concern for the feelings of others and a complete disregard for any sense of social obligation. They seem egocentric and lacking insight and any sense of responsibility or consequence. Their emotions are thought to be superficial and shallow if they exist at all. They are considered callous, manipulative and incapable of lasting relationships, let alone of any kind of love. It is thought that any emotions which the true psychopath exhibits are the fruits of watching and mimicking other people's emotions. They show poor impulse control and a low tolerance for frustration and aggression. They show no empathy, remorse, anxiety or guilt in relation to their behavior, in short, they truly seem devoid of conscience.

Psychopaths have been shown to be unable to learn from punishment and behavior modification. They have been regularly observed to respond to both by becoming more cunning and hiding their behavior better. It has been suggested that traditional therapeutic approaches actually make them, if not worse, then far more adept at manipulating others and concealing their behavior. They are generally considered to be not only incurable but also untreatable.

Most studies of the psychopath have taken place among prison populations, though it has often been suggested that the psychopath is just as likely to sit on a Board of Directors as behind bars, concealing his true nature behind a well crafted "Mask of Sanity" (also the title of the one of the first definitive studies of psychopathy written by Hervey Cleckley in 1941).