William Faulkner

            I met William Toste in the visitor's room of the New Haven County jail. He was charged with the murder of Mabel Stebbins and I was his special public defender. A glance showed me he was outside my experience. Tight afro curls extended more than a foot from each side of a thin face. A persistent smile implied he knew the secret of the universe. After listening to what he had to say, I knew I would not trick prosecution witnesses like Perry Mason on television. Toste was apprehended driving the murdered woman's car. Blood stains spotted his pants, and the silver coins in his pocket belonged to the dead woman's son. Last and by no means least, he had confessed. According to the police he was advised of his rights before he said a word.
            I question our practice of deciding criminal cases on grounds having nothing to do with guilt or innocence. When the crime is insubstantial, I enjoy the game as much as anyone, but murder is different. I was in no mood to hear him admit guilt, but seek acquittal because damaging evidence had been illegally obtained. Distinguishing among crimes is illogical, some would say unethical, but I make no apology. When someone commits a vicious crime, I refuse to resort to technicality. I leave those cases to lawyers more combative than myself.
            Toste spared me my dilemma. He admitted the murder with a startling lack of remorse. My shock at his matter of fact confession reminded me that my sensibilities are by no means universal. I visited Dachau, Germany, home of a Third Reich concentration camp. The train deposited me in the center of town, a tourist with no idea how to reach my gruesome destination. I stopped a passerby whose English was no better than my German and asked, "Where is the concentration camp?" He was puzzled, but then with a gleam of understanding, said, "Ach, the crematorium", and sent me precisely on my way. Until Vietnam I enjoyed a moral superiority over that helpful stranger. I was embarrassed at his having to acknowledge so awful a neighbor, but if touring Vietnamese were to ask for directions to the nearest napalm factory, I would, like my German guide, answer without hesitation. Moral posturing is dangerous, but I could not help myself. I knew I felt worse about the murder than Toste did.
            I told him the maximum sentence was twenty-five years to life in prison and that the prosecutor offered twenty years to life in exchange for a guilty plea. He rejected the plea bargain. He did not want prison time. He was insane and needed help. He agreed to be institutionalized for life and never request release, but he wanted soft time in a mental hospital, not hard time in a penitentiary. He listened patiently as I explained the system and its possibilities. When I finished, he smiled his smile and said I could do it if I wanted. I have reservations about psychiatrists, but an insanity plea seemed reasonable. Toste had been a patient in Fairfield Hills, a state mental hospital, where he was diagnosed as mentally retarded with the likelihood of organic brain damage. He attributed the brain damage to his father's attempt to drown him when he was an infant. By itself his account might be deranged fantasy, but his mother corroborated his recollection. The problem with an insanity plea was that he might be released unable to survive in society. He lacked human connections and psychiatry could not make his world less hostile. This did not alter the fact that his life had the texture of a nightmare, incidents so debasing they excused everything, even murder. Surrendering him to the psychiatrists was, I grandly decided, a risk that must be run.
            William Toste was born October 27, 1950, the third of five children. Not much is known about his father. Toste believed he was black, and attributed his strength of character to this ethnic heritage. His mother insisted her first husband, like her second, was Puerto Rican. When Toste was two his father vanished. His mother, unable or unwilling to maintain the home, placed her children in a White Plains, New York orphanage. Toste remained there until he was seven when he and his sister, both diagnosed as retarded, were transferred to Willowbrook, a state institution on Staten Island. Years later Geraldo Rivera made his reputation exposing conditions there. Toste was at Willowbrook eleven years, discharged into the custody of his mother November 17, 1968, my fortieth birthday. His Willowbrook record is a litany of abandonment. In those eleven years he had no visitors. I asked his mother why she never saw her son. She said she couldn't get to Staten Island from the Bronx where she lived. She also remarried. It was easier to put the past, and her son, behind her.
            On his release from Willowbrook, Toste came to Bridgeport, Connecticut to live with his mother and step-father. They argued, and in retaliation for some unremembered slight, Toste put detergent in the stew. Its pine scent exposed the plan and his step-father threw him out. Toste worked several jobs, all unskilled, all for brief periods of time. There were minor brushes with the law. He had, in fact, been released from jail the morning of the murder. Two months before the murder, Toste met John Stebbins, the victim's son. John, an engineer in a local plant, lived with his mother in a middle class black ghetto of well kept one family homes. He met Toste at the intersection of Middle and Golden Hill Streets in downtown Bridgeport. In halcyon days before suburban shopping centers, my father and uncle operated a store on that corner. My main memory of the intersection occurred in 1936 when I watched Franklin Roosevelt's motorcade from the roof of my father's store. I remember streets lined with cheering people and a gray-haired spectacled man waving from the back seat of an open car. The procession drove west on Golden Hill up from the railroad station, turned left onto Middle Street and disappeared, leaving me to wonder what the fuss was about. Today the intersection is a red light district where people wait to be picked up by passing motorists. In 1976 when Toste murdered Mabel Stebbins, illicit activity was restricted to night time, but the curious thing about decline is one never knows when it ends. Street business is now conducted in broad daylight.
            Toste insisted nothing homosexual happened between him and Stebbins, although the circumstance of their meeting, Stebbins driving-Toste loitering, raises the question. After picking him up, Stebbins took Toste home to a finished basement, cold beer, conversation, and back to the intersection when the night was over. Friendship developed, with Toste calling Stebbins at home, and meeting him other times. Toste suggested the house was large enough for him to live there, an important idea to Toste who sometimes slept in parked cars. Stebbins told Toste his mother would not permit it.
            Toste was arrested for assault. Another man picked him up and, according to Toste, made homosexual advances. When he resisted, the man complained to the police. Toste was sentenced to ten days in jail, his term completed the morning of the murder. While in jail, Toste wrote Stebbins. He wanted money, letters and visits, but Stebbins, who realized his pick-up was more than he bargained for, did nothing. Toste was discharged in the morning. It was afternoon before he found the Stebbins' house. He broke into the basement, helped himself to a beer, smoked a cigarette, defecated, but did not flush the toilet, a detail carefully included in his confession. When Mrs. Stebbins returned, he put a towel over his face, went upstairs and stabbed her until his knife broke. He took another knife from a kitchen drawer. When that broke, he used a can opener. The medical examiner counted more than sixty separate wounds on her body. Toste took her car and her son's coin collection, and drove to Fairfield Hills, the mental hospital where he had been a patient. He walked the grounds before returning to Bridgeport. I asked him why he did not try to run for it. He did not know.
            As luck would have it, Robert Szloski, the only son of a blue collar family, arrived home from law school, and was in a phone booth near the bus station calling for someone to pick him up. Toste, driving by, lost control of the car. It struck the phone booth, killing the young man. Toste was walking away when a passing detective arrested him. The police discovered the car belonged to Mabel Stebbins and asked about her murder. It was then he confessed. I do not know what happened between Toste and Stebbins, but I sympathize with anyone who sympathized with Toste. My life had been different. My parents did not desert me and my father provided more than the usual material amenities. I was never hungry, never cold, and never have I slept in a vermin infested bed. In return for these blessings I was supposed to be both grateful and famous, two filial obligations that remain unfulfilled. Guilt at my shortcomings subsided, but since I saw the failings as mine, I emerged from childhood relatively benign, angry at no one but myself.
            My mother unwittingly opened me to Toste. Raised in a Chicago slum, she was grateful for her escape. When we took the train to New York City she invariably said as it passed Harlem, "There but for the grace of God, go I." When I met Toste I was uncomfortable with my elevated economic class, but I knew about deranged minds. As part of a college program, I had worked in the occupational therapy department of a New Jersey mental hospital, where I learned good intentions do not matter. A patient I will call Shaunessy made scrub brushes. We played Casino, a card game he invariably won. I liked him and was concerned when he was missing from the shop a few days. On his return, he explained someone put a buzzer in his head which kept him from sleeping. I impulsively decided to confess I installed the buzzer in order to say I took it out. "Shaunessy", I said. "I have a confession to make. I put that buzzer in your head". Before I could continue, he looked at me with a look I will not forget and said, "I knew you did it."
            The experience warned me about getting close to Toste. He had been diagnosed as a "sociopathic personality". According to the literature, sociopathic personalities are not amenable to treatment. They react to needs of the moment and know nothing of the give and take of normal human interaction. I thought I knew what was involved, but I learned my humanity, which I perceived as generous and warm, was vanity. In the process of discovery, I opened a Pandora's box that is yet to be closed.
            We drifted closer. I gave him money and, after guards 'lost' two girlie magazines meant for him (those magazines are currency in jail), I delivered the magazines directly, a violation of prison rules. He insisted I visit every three weeks which I did. On one occasion when my regular visit was inconvenient, I came the next day. He was incensed. He said he looked forward to my visits and did not appreciate being disappointed. Prison life is nothing but small expectations. His tone suggested that if I did not do what he wanted I would be sorry. I told him not to threaten me. I said I liked him, which was true, and that threats were unnecessary. I said I was writing a book about self-image psychology and that I believed it important for everyone to think well of himself. I suggested he learn to read and write so we could correspond without intermediaries. It would not only be convenient, it would symbolize an improved self-image, a sign he might no longer be inclined to murder. This is not to say that literacy inhibits homicide, only that to my way of thinking, a constructive task completed indicates a changed self perception.
            In retrospect, I see my interest in Toste stemmed from guilt. In 1938 my father was one of the few who, as he put it, brought home the bacon. My elementary school had no cafeteria and everyone brought lunch. In those depression days, many classmates ate bread and mustard. I wanted mustard sandwiches, but my mother would not hear of it. Nothing but meat for me, the best fed kid in class. About this time my parents took me on a Caribbean cruise. One day we drove up a mountain to Caracas, Venezuela. I remember the grinding poverty. A street urchin my age followed us everywhere. I assume he wondered how he would look in my white linen suit and knee socks. As for me, I remembered what my mother said about the grace of God.
            I am not to blame for the horror that is Toste's life. When he entered Willowbrook, I graduated law school and had not heard of the place, although I knew about state institutions. At the mental hospital where I met Shaunessy, they prescribed electric shock treatments like aspirin. I eavesdropped on a seminar that reviewed the cases of four patients whose electric shock treatments followed a series of insulin shocks. The patients were paralyzed and the question was, "Does anyone have any ideas?" Public institutions are not caring places. Had I known about Willowbrook, I would have suspected, before Rivera's expose, inmates were also victims.
            Like everyone, I forgive myself for collective trespasses. I say it is too bad authorities are not more intelligent, sensitive or caring. I think I care where they do not, but perhaps we cannot put Humpty Dumpty together any more than we can unscramble minds twisted by years of institutional cruelty. A psychiatrist I know believes the most difficult aspect of his practice is weeding out the truly deranged, patients indelicate enough to commit suicide or run amok through unsuspecting neighborhoods. They diminish reputations, depreciate collective perceptions of one's skills, and expose one to malpractice actions. Discretion is the better part of valor, and discretion would have insisted on the most professional of relationships between me and Toste. Instead we talked about self image. I tried persuading him that although he faced twenty five years to life, there are alternatives to despair and anger. It now occurs to me, I may have been wrong.
            Our discussions were frank. He told me he thought about walking into my office with a knife. In his fantasy I fall to my knees and plead for mercy. He asked me if I would beg. I answered by asking if it would do any good. He thought and decided it would not. I replied if it would do no good, I would not do it. His dream troubled me. I did not realize he had no alternative to hating my easy comings and goings. I resented my good intent amounting to nothing. In a revenge I regret, I worked him into a favorite fantasy and told him about it. In my dream the book I have been writing for years is published to rave reviews. I am acclaimed as history's most important philosopher. With unbridled generosity I give Toste a small percentage of the royalties, a tidy sum. On his release from prison he becomes my trusted chauffeur. A grateful nation elects me president. I am widely loved except for one lunatic assassin Toste spots in the crowd. He, more generous than me, lunges between me and the assassin, doing for me what the mayor of Chicago did for Franklin Roosevelt many years ago. Toste dies but not before telling me how grateful he is to have known me. As I think about the two fantasies, I see them as uncomfortably similar and were I to choose the more bizarre, it would be mine. I find it curious that I of enlightened philosophy (putting aside the delusions of grandeur), solve the riddle of our relationship with death.
            Eventually the case came to trial. Toste's sanity was to be tested by the Uniform Penal Code's recently approved definition. Before the Code, Connecticut followed the McNaughton rule promulgated in 1843 England. Under McNaughton, a person is insane if he does not know what he is doing or if he does not know what he is doing is wrong. The Penal Code defines insanity as delusion or mental defect. Delusion is more precise. A defendant who thinks he rings a door bell when he pulls a trigger is innocent if he can persuade a jury he confused the two acts. Mental defect defies definition. It ranges from organic brain damage, not always provable, to abnormal emotional attitudes created by unfortunate life experiences. Since mental defect implies deviation from a norm, the more bizarre the crime, the more likely it involves a mental defect.
            Expert testimony at the trial illustrated the problems of the insanity defense. The state's psychiatrist testified Toste was a sociopathic (formerly "psychopathic") personality, stuff of cold blooded killers. According to the state's doctor, Toste knew what he was doing, but did not care. In his opinion, not caring is not a mental defect. The defense psychologist testified that after reviewing more than two thousand violent crimes, he found every violent criminal had been brutalized as a child. Brutalized children lose inhibitions against violence. To him those missing inhibitions were a mental defect.
            In his charge to the jury the judge used the McNaughton standard. He said Toste's attempt to flee indicated he knew what he did was wrong. The jury deliberated and found Toste guilty of murder, but before passing sentence (twenty years to life) the judge said he regretted the state had no facilities for him other than prison.After sentencing, Toste asked for a television set. It was, he said, his last request, and he would demonstrate his gratitude by never contacting me again. I bought the set, not because I did not want to see him, although the prospect was not unattractive, but because television might shorten long days ahead. I was surprised to receive this letter several months later.

Dear Mr. Kunin:

I am going to have Mr. Charles Grover of the Conn. Prison Association go and see you. He's reading my transcript, and if he feels that I need to go to Whiting (a mental health facility) he's going to talk to some doctors. I want you also to help me by giving him some information about the way you were feeling that I needed some help.

Tell him about the case, about the way I've been treated, that I've been down in the gutter and still am. And tell him how you feel I should be at Whiting. Now is the time to tell this man. Tell him about the psychiatrist who had the best report, the one who did not get up on the stand, that you told me about.

Try and give all the information to him, and don't let me down please, because you've been trying to get me to Whiting all along. Maybe Mr. Grover could talk to the psychiatrist. Mr. Grover and my sponsor, Mrs. Sarah Hannan, going to do everything they can to get me up to Whiting, so they need a lot of information from you. She seems like a nice woman and she wants to help me any way she can.

I miss you a whole lot. You're one of the best lawyers I had for my case. Even though you didn't win the case. I still like you and think of you a whole lot. How are you feeling today? I'm still trying to make it day by day by by day. Thank you for everything you have done for me. Please write me as soon as you get this letter, because this is a very important letter. That's all for now.

Sincerely,

William Toste

I replied:

April 14, 1978

Dear Mr. Toste:

At one of our last meetings you told me I would not hear from you if I bought you a television set. When someone thinks it worth something to someone not to hear from him, he does not think much of himself, but not hearing from you was not my reason for buying the set. I bought it to help you pass what must be hard days, and I did not write because my dream is to write a book and I was saving my wondrous prose for humanity.

Unfortunately the book remains a meagre ten triple space pages. I despair of getting it together, but it would be nothing without our story. I remember you dreamed of killing me as I begged for mercy, and I know part of you wants that dream as much as I want to be a published author.

You must resent my life, especially when you remember the eleven years at Willowbrook. We both know your life is not my fault. It is not your fault either, but you paid the dues. So here we are. You with a demon that sometimes controls your body-me with the best of intentions but unwilling to change my life in order to give you the human contact you lack.

I stand exposed as a humanitarian without humanity. It occurs to me that we represent the ultimate problem facing mankind. Can we forget the past? Can we go on to newer, happier possibilities, and if we can, what newer and happier possibilities are within reach?

If you have any ideas on the subject, I would like to hear them.
Meanwhile I wish you peace.

Edward F. Kunin