State v. Mary Doherty essays

State v. Mary Doherty essays 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 todays 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 didnt seem to know what to do with young criminals during that period. According to Holly Brewers book Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Brewer, 2005, p. 220), state superior court cases show todays researchers that there was a profound transformation in attitudes toward culpability and an accused young persons 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 father with an axe in Tennessee in 1806; accounts differ as to whether she was twelve or thirteen. She was charged with murdering her father, chopping up his body and burying the body parts under the floorboards of the house. According to Brewers account, the father was a drunkard, and two of his four children had run away, while Mary, the oldest, had stayed home. The suggestion is that the father was possibly abusive, although there was no evidence available to verify that. It was known that Michael Dohertys wife was not in the family for some reason when this horrific event took place. Brewer writes that there was blood on the axe, in Michael Dohe...