But we found that this news didn’t encourage the rest of our troops much, given what’d gone on in court during the day. As expected, Mr. Darrow’d opened the defense’s case with his three experts, who’d each done their level best to reinforce the jury’s already strong inclination to find Libby Hatch not guilty, Albert Hamilton, the snake-oil salesman-turned-forensics expert, had managed to lay out enough confusing information about guns and bullets to make Lucius’s testimony seem, if not mistaken, at least improvable. To start with, he’d said, the slug what the state’d found in the Hatches’ wagon might have come from Daniel Hatch’s Colt, or it might not have: because there was no central registry for firearms (just as Lucius and Marcus had told us) and because the Colt Peacemaker had been such a popular model of revolver for so many years, the odds that the bullet had in fact come from some other gun were nothing close to the million to one what Lucius had estimated. As for the identifying marks on the missile itself, Hamilton took great pains to explain just how high production standards at Samuel Colt’s factory were, and how the specifications of every piece turned out were consistent with all those of the same model. Even the nick inside the muzzle of Hatch’s gun what produced the small mark on the bullets that we’d seen could’ve been the result of a factory defect, “Dr.” Hamilton said, a defect shared by dozens and maybe hundreds of other Peacemakers. Mr. Picton, on cross-examination, had asked how a factory what had such high production standards could turn out hundreds of revolvers with the same muzzle flaw, a question what Hamilton hadn’t been able to answer; but, incompetent as the man obviously was to anybody who knew anything about ballistics, he’d done a lot of damage with the laymen of the jury, and Mr. Darrow’s claim that the state’s ballistic evidence was untrustworthy had seemed proved.

As for the Doctor’s associate, William Alanson White, it’d been his job to dispute the state’s contention that a sane woman could plan and carry out the murders of her own children-and he had, it seemed, seen to his task pretty effectively. He was helped by the fact that during his career he hadn’t dabbled much in the psychology of family relationships, certainly not in the controversial way what the Doctor and others of his breed (like Dr. Adolf Meyer) had; because White’s business was pretty strictly criminals and their mental disorders, he was seen from the beginning as less peculiar than the Doctor, and therefore more trustworthy. On top of that, he hadn’t done any direct personal work with Clara Hatch, a fact what under ordinary circumstances might’ve made him look something less than fully informed, but what in this troubling, topsy-turvy case made him seem more detached and reliable. On being asked by Mr. Darrow for his “educated opinion” about Clara’s mental condition, Dr. White’d answered that he didn’t really believe that the memories of a girl who’d been through such an ordeal-and who was still, after all, very young-could be relied on. Such was what the jury wanted to hear-it was a lot easier than accepting that what Clara’d said was true-and so they’d seemed to ignore Dr. White’s own statements about not being an expert on kids and accepted the rest of what he had to say.

The main part of his testimony, though, had focused on Libby Hatch herself, and on the notion of whether she was capable of the crime what the state’d charged her with. Dr. White said that, after spending some three hours with the woman, he’d formed the same opinion as Dr. Kreizler: that Libby, though emotional and impulsive, was free from any mental disease and was, especially as far as the legal definition of the word went, sane. But the conclusion Dr. White drew from this was the opposite of what Dr. Kreizler’s had been: Libby’s sanity was a very strong indication-if not outright proof-that she couldn’t have shot her kids. In his experience, he said, there were only three reasons women committed such crimes: insanity, poverty, or the children being illegitimate. Since none of these reasons was in extreme evidence in this case, the state’s explanation of what’d happened was “not credible.”

“The very character of the crime,” Dr. White had said, using words Mr. Picton’d found so outrageous he’d written them down, “is sufficient to warrant a diagnosis of mental disease.” Libby Hatch had no mental disease; so, using logic what, again, was flawed to professional ears but very appealing to a jury, she couldn’t have done it.

But what about all the other cases what Mr. Picton and Dr. Kreizler had brought up, Mr. Darrow’d then asked, cases involving women who’d unquestionably murdered their own children and been found sane by courts and juries? What about Lydia Sherman, for instance? Lydia Sherman, Dr. White’d replied, had unfortunately committed her crimes during a time when mental science was in a much more primitive state; on top of that, people had been so disgusted by the killings that “Queen Poisoner” had been accused of, and there’d been so much evidence and so many witnesses to speak against her, that the possibility of her getting a fair trial, much less being found mentally incompetent, had been about zero. The alienists of the time had been too unsophisticated to understand what’d been wrong with the woman, and the public had been desperate for revenge: this was Dr. White’s simple explanation for why Lydia Sherman’s fate had been sealed. Mr. Darrow’d then asked Dr. White if, in his opinion, this injustice was now being repeated, maybe even outdone, by the state of New York’s attempt to convict and execute Libby Hatch? Yes, Dr. White had solemnly answered; in fact, since Libby Hatch was, in his opinion, innocent, the injustice was even greater.

Finally, there’d been Mrs. Cady Stanton to seal the deal for the defense. Mr. Darrow’s questioning of her had been particularly clever: as a lifelong battler for women’s rights, he’d asked, didn’t Mrs. Cady Stanton feel that members of her sex had to accept all of the burdens as well as the advantages of equality? Didn’t she think that they shouldn’t be allowed to “hide behind their skirts,” to use their gender as an excuse or even an explanation for certain crimes? Of course, Mrs. Cady Stanton had said; and if the crime Libby Hatch had been accused of had been anything other than murdering her own children, the old suffragist wouldn’t have bothered traveling to Ballston Spa to give testimony. But in this one thing, childbirth and parenting, she said, men and women were not and never could be equal. Repeating what she’d told us when she came to Number 808 Broadway, Mrs. Cady Stan ton had lectured the jury and the galleries about the “divine creative power” of women that was made manifest in the connection between a mother and child. If that power was used for evil purposes, she said, it could not be the woman’s doing-after all, no woman could possibly betray a force what, being divine, was greater than her own will. No, if a woman did commit violence against her own child, it was either because she was insane or because the society of men had forced her into it somehow; probably both.

This last point was tough for Mr. Picton to argue on cross-examination; for he, during his time with Dr. Kreizler, had come to understand how very much Libby Hatch’s actions might indeed have been affected by the society of men. But both Mr. Picton and the Doctor held that, such effects aside, Libby was still legally responsible for her own actions, and Mr. Picton had asked Mrs. Cady Stanton if she didn’t agree. No, she’d answered, throwing the Doctor a look what said that, though she wasn’t allowed to speak of it, she did believe that he was involved in some kind of mysterious witch-hunt. No, she said, a woman so harried and hounded as to be capable of murdering her own children must certainly have been driven insane-certainly legally insane, meaning unaware of the nature of her acts or that they were wrong-by man’s society. And since neither the prosecution’s nor the defense’s expert mental witnesses had found Libby to in fact be insane, she could not have committed the crimes.