“I plead not guilty to the indictment,” Guiteau stated, in a plea that he had drafted himself. His first and primary defense was “Insanity, in that it was God’s act and not mine. The Divine pressure on me to remove the president was so enormous that it destroyed my free agency, and therefore I am not legally responsible for my act.” Although Guiteau laid blame for the shooting squarely on God’s shoulders, he made it clear that his faith in divine intervention—at least when his own life was at stake—remained unshaken. “I have entire confidence in His disposition to protect me,” he wrote in the
...more
