The Insanity Defense
On May 15, 1890, Alphonse J. Stephani fatally shot his father’s lawyer, ex-Judge Clinton G. Reynolds. The 25-year-old Alphonse had already blown through a generous inheritance of $100,000 (approximately $3.5 million in 2025) from his father when he betrayed his mother’s trust — she was the executrix of the estate — to gain control over the remaining assets of the estate. Reynolds advised Mrs. Stephani to bring criminal charges against her son, but she chose to bring a civil lawsuit instead.[1]
Angry Words and a Gunshot
On the morning that Stephani was served with process he went directly to Reynolds’s law office at 61 Wall Street. The two men went into the lawyer’s private office. Angry words where overheard followed by the sound of a gunshot. Three office clerks rushed into the office and found Stephani holding a “smoking revolver” with Reynolds stretched out on the floor gushing blood from a wound below the heart. Stephani turned the “ugly looking ‘English Bulldog’” on the clerks but they wrestled it away from him and knocked him senseless with a blow from a chair.[2]
Reynolds died from his wound five days later, but not before giving a statement to the coroner. He said that he tearfully pleaded with Stephani to reconcile with his mother and informed him that he had started an action and obtained an injunction against him when Stephani suddenly stood up and shot him. Stephani was arrested and held in the “Tombs,” the infamous prison complex in lower Manhattan. He wasted no time in securing William F. Howe of the high-profile criminal defense team of Howe & Hummel to represent him.[3]
The Trial
Stephani’s trial began on March 30, 1891, in the Court of Oyer and Terminer, New York County, before Charles H. Van Brunt, the Presiding Justice of the General Term of the Supreme Court for the First Judicial Department. The prosecution was led by New York County District Attorney De Lancey Nicoll, supported by Assistant District Attorney Francis Wellman and ex-Judge William Fullerton, a prominent trial lawyer of the day hired by the Reynolds family. Sitting directly behind the defendant at trial was his mother, who was “said to be so much interested in saving the life of her unfortunate son that she is to pay the lawyers $35,000 in case he escapes the fatal chair.”[4] The reported fee was quite substantial for the time, equivalent to about $1.2 million in 2025. The suggestion that the fee was in some way contingent on the outcome of the trial is noteworthy. Contingent legal fees in criminal matters are today universally prohibited by ethical rules.
The Insanity Defense
At trial, Stephani’s defense was that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. According to the New York Times:
Stephani paid no attention to what the witnesses were saying. His appearance was well in keeping with the defense of insanity, on which his lawyers rely. His long black hair fell down to his shoulders, and in that he took more interest than in anything else, every few moments combing it back with his fingers. His favorite attitude, when not combing back his hair, was to sit with his chair tilted back, his hands clasped behind it, and his eyes directed toward the ceiling.
Mrs. Stefani testified that insanity ran in her husband’s family and that Alphonse, who had been strange since childhood, grew worse after falling from a horse as a teenager. She also stated that Alphonse had tried to kill himself on two occasions.
Dr. Hamilton
Howe called several medical experts in support of the claim of insanity, including Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton, MD, LLD, FRS,[5] the grandson of founding father Alexander Hamilton and one of the leading “alienists” or psychiatrists of his day. Reflecting on the Stephani trial in his memoirs many years later, Dr. Hamilton described it as a difficult case. While the defendant was in his view suffering from paranoid delusions he also engaged in behavior that made him appear to be simulating insanity.
Stephani shammed insanity, became silent, and gave silly as well as contradictory answers. He too suddenly grew indifferent to appearances, cultivated a leonine mane of shaggy hair, and performed a number of ridiculous things such as gyrating about the room and wiggling his fingers, the artificial nature of which was even apparent to the guards. It appears that he had really suffered, however, for years from delusions with a classical train of symptoms, such as insane false ideas of suspicion and persecution, and of poisoning. . . In addition to his paranoia he suffered from epilepsy. Stephani was tried, convicted and sentenced to state’s prison for life, despite my evidence. In a year, his insanity became so evident to every one that he was transferred to Dannemora.[6]
Prosecution Declines to Cross-Examine Dr. Hamilton
The trial was notable for being one of the few times that the wily and dramatic Howe was bested by the prosecution. According to Assistant D.A. Wellman, Howe’s direct examination of Dr. Hamilton was extremely brief.
1. “Dr. Hamilton, you have examined the prisoner at the Bar, have you not?”
2. “I have sir.”
3. “Is he, in your opinion, sane or insane?”
4. “Insane.”
5. “You may cross-examine.”[7]
As Wellman gloriously recalled it, Howe believed that the prosecutors were “a couple of inexperienced youngsters, who would cross-examine at great length and allow the witness to make every answer tell with double effect when elicited by the state’s attorney.” When District Attorney Nicoll blunted this strategy by calmly stating, “We have no questions,” Howe exclaimed: “What, not ask the famous Dr. Hamilton a question? Well, I will.” The prosecution objected, and Chief Judge Van Brunt directed the witness to leave the stand, leaving Howe no choice but to call his next witness.[8]
In his memoir, Dr. Hamilton is critical of Howe for — contrary to Wellman’s recollection — reading out “a long, tiresome question which took a half-hour to finish,” and of the D.A. for his “sharp move” in not cross-examining him. “Undoubtedly this was an inspiration, but can one conceive the attitude of a public prosecutor whose duty it is to present all the evidence against as well as in favour of the man in the dock?”[9] (emphasis in original)
Insanity Defense Fails but Later Transferred to State Hospital for Criminally Insane
The insanity defense failed. Stephani was convicted of murder in the second degree and sentenced to life in prison. Although he was never judicially declared insane, Stephani was later transferred, on the recommendation of prison doctors, from Sing Sing Prison to Dannemora State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.[10] Mrs. Stephani never gave up on her son and “spent the remainder of her life in trying to free him.” When her applications for a pardon were denied by several governors, including Teddy Roosevelt, she made sure that he “had as many comforts during his imprisonment as money could buy.”[11]
Marked Ability in Business
Stephani proved to have a “marked ability in business.” He guided his mother’s investment of his money so successfully that by 1914 he was worth more than $100,000, growing to over $144,000 by 1921.[12] Stephani was not permitted to access or spend of any his wealth, except for $50 a month permitted by the prison system. In 1914, he brought a habeas corpus proceeding to have himself declared sane, but the writ was denied and he never left Dannemora.[13] By the time he died in 1935, Stephani left an estate worth over $400,000 and a will that purported to disinherit all of his blood relatives and established a foundation to provide income for certain German cities.
Stephani’s Will
Surrogate Charles M. Harrington of Clinton County denied probate of Stephani’s will on the ground that helacked testamentary capacity.[14] Faced with what he considered conflicting testimony, the Surrogate ultimately was swayed by the fact that Stephani, though he was never formally adjudicated insane, spent “the last 32 years . . . confined in the Dannemora State Hospital, where only persons are confined who, in the opinion of the physicians of the penal institutions of this state, are insane.”
The Appellate Division, Third Department, unanimously reversed the Surrogate’s decree and admitted Stephani’s will to probate.[15] In an opinion by Justice Crapser, the court found:
The proof as to testamentary capacity in this case is uncontradicted, four witnesses testified to it and to the facts constituting it, no witnesses contradicted it. . . . The surrogate seems to have rested his decision upon the fact that the testator had been confined in Dannemora State Hospital for 32 years. That fact is not enough in itself, giving it its greatest weight, to overcome the positive testimony of the three doctors, connected at times with the State Hospital where he was confined, who knew him. The fact of his confinement, if given its greatest weight, could only be prima facia evidence, and the direct evidence in the case was entirely sufficient to warrant the will being probated, there being no evidence opposed to it.[16]
Though legal and medical standards defining insanity were in flux during the late 1800s, the Court of Appeals in Flanagan v. People (52 NY 467 [1873]) had adopted the M’Naghten Rule as the proper test to judge a defense of insanity: “the test of responsibility for criminal acts, where unsoundness of mind is interposed as a defence, is the capacity of the defendant to distinguish between right and wrong at the time of and with respect to the act which is the subject of the inquiry.”
[1] Shot Down in His Office: Lawyer Clinton G. Reynolds Fatally Wounded, New York Times, May 16, 1890.
[2] Id.
[3] Stephani Sent to the Tombs: Mr. Reynolds’s Condition is Critical, with Slight Hopes, New York Times, May 17,1890.
[4] The Trial of Young Stephani For the Murder of Ex-Judge Reynolds: A Plea of Insanity, New York Times, March 31, 1891.
[5] Fellow of the Royal Society, a prestigious title bestowed on those who have made significant contributions to science, engineering or technology.
[6] Allan McLane Hamilton, Recollections of an Alienist – Personal and Professional, George H. Doran Co., (1916), at 333.
[7] Frances Wellman, The Art of Cross Examination, Macmillan Co., 4th ed., (1936), at 150-51.
[8] Richard H. Underwood, Gaslight Lawyers: Criminal Trials & Exploits in Gilded Age New York, Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2017, at 30-31.
[9] Hamilton, at 280.
[10] In Re Stephani’s Estate, 159 Misc. 43, Surr. Ct., Clinton Co. (1936).
[11] Rich Slayer Seeks to Prove Sanity, New York Times, Aug. 4, 1914.
[12] Murderer Has $144,132, New York Times, Jan. 30, 1921.
[13] People ex rel. Stephani v North, 91 Misc. 616, Sup. Ct., Clinton Co. (1915).
[14] In Re Stephani’s Estate, 159 Misc. at
[15] In Re Stephani’s Will, 250 AD 253, App. Div., 3rd Dept. (1937).
[16] Id. at 257.