State v. Mary Doherty
In the early part of the 19th Century, court cases in which young people were charged with serious crimes came out much differently than they would by today's standards. In fact in some cases children under the age of 14 were not convicted of crimes that they had obviously committed because they were believed to be incapable of testifying accurately. In other cases young people (children) were not allowed to testify because it was thought that they were too young to understand what they were charged with. Courts really didn't seem to know what to do with young criminals during that period. According to Holly Brewer's book Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Brewer, 2005, p. 220), state superior court cases show today's researchers that there was a "profound transformation in attitudes toward culpability" and an accused young person's age was becoming critical, in the early 19th Century, to not only deciding what the punishment should be, but "guilt itself" (Brewer, p. 220). In fact, Brewer writes, most criminal court decisions set fourteen as the minimum age for witness testimony in criminal cases. Mary Doherty was either twelve or thirteen years of age when she allegedly killed her
However, children under the age of fourteen but not less than seven years of age, the law at that time presumed that this person "cannot discern between right and wrong. The suggestion is that the father was possibly abusive, although there was no evidence available to verify that. It appears that Mary had in fact confessed some of the facts to a coroner but the judge in the case refused to allow that testimony. A third account of this murder trial (www. Kaye writes that Mary was "never seen to eat and had to be force fed. father with an axe in Tennessee in 1806; accounts differ as to whether she was twelve or thirteen. While in jail she lay on a bed of straw, and the jailer only heard her speak to a black girl, but she never spoke to authorities. " This sets up the possibility that the other children may have helped kill the father, although again, there is no evidence to suggest this might be true. " One of the interesting things about this case is that Mary was nearly silent while in jail for four months. All those reports and issues aside, the bottom line is that a twelve or thirteen year-old girl was found innocent of a crime she certainly appeared to have committed - all because she was younger than 14, and possibly because the jury believed her silence had been created by God Himself. As it turned out, Mary Doherty was indeed found to be mute "by visitation of God" and after a few hours the jury found her "not guilty.
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Acceptance Essays
