The Dorothy Talbye Trial (1638) is an early American example of a trial of an insane woman at a time when the insane were treated no differently than ordinary criminals. Talbye was hanged in 1639 for killing her three year old daughter because, as she claimed, God told her to do so. Although Puritan Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw Talbye as possessed by Satan, the penalty for murder was necessarily death.
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“Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident—the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.”
—Edward C. Banfield (b. 1916)