Question

The Narrator from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" is being charged with the murder of his wife and will face a criminal trial. He has decided to plea "not guilty due to insanity." This means that if he is proven insane, he is free to go to a mental institution and not a correctional facility. You are a juror and have listened to his testimony and have carefully analyzed his case. Do you think that his plea of "not guilty due to insanity" is permissible? Should he be charged with murder?

Answer 1

The narrator from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat", by deciding to plea "not guilty due to insanity", is doing something many people charged with murder do: blaming their own acts on a certain "demonic" mindset, which can be caused by evil spirits or even drugs (legal or illegal). The narrator has a history of alcohol abuse, which, according to his own testimony throughout the short story, led him to cut one of his cat's eyes out of its socket. He'd also been violent to his wife, not only verbally, and said he'd committed violent acts precisely because of their malignant essence. This man is no good. Therefore, there's no point in validating his plea of "not guilty due to insanity" and he should indeed be charged with murder. After all, he killed his wife with the strike of an axe upon her head, just because she wanted to stop him from killing their cat. As the narrator admits, he was then possessed by unstoppable anger, and that's not a reason for claiming to have done anything due to insanity at all.