The Devils on the Dock

The Defendant was a San Francisco longshoreman who quarreled with his foreman on the pier. After the foreman struck him during the argument, the Defendant went home, retrieved a .25 caliber pistol, returned to the dock, and — despite the efforts of police and bystanders to stop him — shot the foreman once, fatally. At trial the Defense called a psychiatrist, who testified that the Defendant suffered from chronic paranoid schizophrenia, fell into trances in which he heard voices and saw visions of devils, and was driven by an obsessive, compulsive rage rather than a considered intent to kill. The doctor concluded the Defendant lacked the malice and specific mental state that murder requires. The judge, sitting without a jury, heard all of it — and still had to decide whether the visions excused the trigger.