Evening capital. (Annapolis, Md.) 1884-1910, 1888-04-05
MAKING 4 FALSE CONFESSION.
DIR. w. A. Hammond Talks About the
Self Accused Criminal.

DIR. w. A. Hammond Talks About the
Self Accused Criminal.
proposed to show that no uncommon cir
cumstance for persons to confess to having
perpetrated crimes of which they were either
certainly or probably innocent, and that
there are forces in operation in the human
mind which may prompt to the making of a
false confession, even though by so doing
life, liberty or property be put in danger.
Thus there is a difficulty in the minds of
some persons who exhibit no other evidence
of mental alteration to discriminate between
their thoughts or their dreams and absolute
facts. They brood over some real or imagi-
nary circumstances until they bring them
selves to believe in its reality.
Such a person, for instance, reads in the
daily press of some shocking murder that
has been committed, the perpetrator of
which has escaped unrecognized. He reads
it in one newspaper, and in another and an
other hears it talked up among his COM
panions and begins by wondering whether or
not the murderer win ever be discovered.
He knows that murders have been committed
by persons who at the time were in state of
somnambulism or who were suffering from
an epileptic paroxysm Perhaps he has him
self in his youth walked in his sleep or has
had convulsion, as his mother has told him.
Suddenly the idea strikes him that he may
be the guilty man. AT first the notion is hor-
rible to him, but its very horror renders it
attractive He goes to the Academy of Med
icine and reads up on the subject of epilepsy.
There is scarcely disease, especially of the
nervous system, of which any person at some
time or other of his life has not had one or
more symptoms. The quack medicine adver-
tisers are fully aware of this fact and make
full use Of it to frighten the ignorant into the
purchase of their trash. Our incipient self
accuser has, therefore, no trouble in finding
what he is looking after, and he goes home
fully convinced that he has had an epileptic
paroxysm, during which he may have been a
murderer The transition from q possibility
to reality presents no difficulties to his
mind, and he ends by fully believing himself
to be the murderer for whom the police are
seeking. he visits the place where the crime
was committed, questions theresidents of the
neighborhood in regard to all the particulars,
and even interrogates the police relative TO
their plans for securing the murderer and
the secret evidence they have in their pos
session.
At last suspicion turns toward him and
eventually he is arrested The accounts that
he has read in the newspaper and the gossip
he has heard, that, regardless of his original
idea that he had perpetrated the crime dur
ing an epileptic fit, and therefore in state of
conscientiousness, that forces him to make
atonement, he confesses that he perpetrated
the murder and gives full and crcumstan-
tial account of the crime Inquiry soon, how
ever, shows that he could not by any posi-
bility have been the perpetrator, and he is,
therefore, after a few days, during which
the newspapers have given the most sensa-
tional accounts Of his brutality and remorse,
discharged from custody.-Dr. William A.
Hammond.