Two honour killings, two false heroes and two women wrongly condemned by the society

February 27, 1859 was a sunny day in Washington D.C., USA.

- SATISH KUMAR SHARMA

In the morning, a dashing 41 year old lawyer came to Lafayette Square opposite the White House and waved a white handkerchief outside the window of a house in the street. It was signal to the married woman living there, with whom he was having an affair, to come out for an amorous escapade. But unluckily for the man, the signal was seen not by the lady but her husband whom an anonymous letter had warned of the affair two days earlier. So, he came out and confronted the lover and after a brief altercation, shot him dead.The incident shook the capital, for the deceased Phillip Barton Key II was the District Attorney of Columbia, the shooter Daniel Sickles, a US Congressman from New York and friend of the incumbent President Buchanan and the woman, Teresa, Sickles' wife. After the shooting, Sickles turned himself in to the police.

Sickles hired an impressive team of lawyers led by Edwin Stanton, (later Secretary of State during the Lincoln administration) for his defense. The team took the plea of 'temporary insanity' as a ground for the innocence of its client, a first in the legal history of the US. It was pleaded that when the accused learnt of the affair he temporarily lost his mental balance under uncontrollable frenzy and in that state committed the crime after which he regained normalcy.