Verdict

One summer night in 1906, rich, pleasure-loving young Harry Kendall Thaw pumped three bullets into Architect Stanford White, who had seduced Evelyn Nesbit Thaw before her marriage. That killing was the most sensational crime passionnel of the young 20th-century U. S.

Medically speaking, insanity is a disease of the mind such as schizophrenia or paranoia. But in the eyes of the law, insanity may be a temporary mental derangement which renders a person not responsible for his acts. After Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe, a Manhattan neurologist, told a jury that Thaw was thus deranged at the time of the shooting, he was acquitted, confined in an asylum. Later a jury found him sane, set him free.

At 67, grey, dapper Playboy Thaw is much poorer than he was three decades ago. Some years ago Dr. Jelliffe declared that Thaw had never paid him for his services at the second trial. In 1929 he sued Thaw, but in 1932 his case was thrown out under the statute of limitations. Undaunted, the neurologist sued again, for $10,250, and last week a jury in a U. S. District Court awarded him $750.

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