No Regrets

where the police station was located. She was then directed to the correct location, where she approached Detective Pittman.
    In an attempt to console her, Pittman had murmured, “Things will work out. They always do.”
    “No,” she had replied without hope. “They won’t work out.”
    And now, “the best mother in the world,” according to her friends, would have her fate decided by a jury. The prosecution claimed she was a woman who had planned her crime, however “mentally ill, mentally diseased, mentally defective.” The defense scorned the state’s psychiatric witness who had never even examined her, and deemed the taped confession only further proof of legal insanity.
    Attorney Greg Lawless said, “You heard it—the way she talked... the flat voice... it gave me the chills.”
    The Christine Jonsen case was on the lips of everyone this writer talked to during the weekend of October 13-14. And the consensus of opinion was that she was, indeed, medically and legally insane, that she fit within the narrow parameters of M’Naughton.
    All of us who waited for a verdict were reluctant to leave the marble corridor outside the courtroom. We expected the jury to return within a few hours. But time yawned, and to our surprise they deliberated more than fifteen hours. When they filed back in, the strain of their ordeal was apparent. Several seemed near tears, and their heads were bowed.
    They did not even glance at Christine, and that was a very bad sign.
    The jury foreman handed the verdict to the court clerk. They had found Christine guilty of first-degree murder on two counts.
    Christine Jonsen showed no emotion at all. No tears. She had expected it, and she still believed that she was too unworthy to be forgiven. The verdict was only further proof that she needed to be punished: punished for being a bad wife, a bad mother, “a daughter of perdition.” She had believed that the police would draw their guns and shoot her on that bleak February morning when she’d gone to tell them what she had done. And then she expected to be hanged. Now she expected to be sentenced to the gallows.
    When her lawyers tried to comfort her, she could not speak to them.
    If there was emotion in that courtroom, it was from the jurors. Immediately after Christine was convicted, the jury foreman, Baxter Zilbauer, bitterly denounced the M’Naughton Rule, and the instructions to the jury that had left them no way to return with anything but a guilty verdict.
    “We the members of the jury find the M’Naughton Rule morally objectionable. I speak for every member of the jury when I say this.”
    The other jurors nodded. One spoke up. “We had to find her guilty under this rule whether we wanted to or not.”
    The prosecution took no joy in the verdict. When a member of the courtroom gallery came up to congratulate Deputy Prosecutor Stan Moore on winning, he said curtly, “You don’t understand. I don’t want congratulations.”
    But the jury had been convinced that, as the law was interpreted, Christine Jonsen had known right from wrong. And that was the criterion they had to base their judgment on. Had they had the option to consider whether she had the substantial capacity to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law, the jury would not have convicted her.
    Christine faced the possibility of two life sentences in prison, which would mean that she would be behind bars for at least thirteen years and four months, twice that if her two sentences were to be served consecutively. If she should go to prison, few informed people believed she would survive. She had already been harassed and tormented by female prisoners in county jails. At the time, one long-time probation worker commented bluntly, “If she goes to Purdy [the Washington State Women’s Prison], they will kill her. Some morning, the guards will find her dead.”
    A Seattle homicide detective, not actively involved in the case, lamented the problem. “I’ve seen several cases where killers were frankly psychotic. The blame is on society. We simply have nowhere to send them, and our laws stop us from forcing them to obtain treatment before they become so sick that they do kill someone. Then, when they do, what do you do with them? Warehouse them? It’s a problem the people are going to have to face up to—and change the laws before it’s too late.”
    Christine did not go to prison, at least not in the immediate aftermath of her trial. She went,