Dan Sickle's insanity defense was successful because it seemed jealous rage of a man betrayed by his wife made sense. Using Sickle as a precedent, the same defense was used for Laura Fair in San Francisco after she killed her lover who led her on for eight years that he would get a divorce and then didn't. She shot him on the Oakland ferry after following him when he picked up his wife at the train station. The Laura Fair case was much of the basis for the character of Laura in "The Gilded Age." Laura Fair was acquitted in her second trial, after appeal -- although Laura Fair did lecture in Sacramento after her trial, she did not die of a broken heart, as did Laura in the novel. Twain was outraged about the jury system -- after all, many witnesses had seen the murder, and even Governor Stanford was nearby. But this was an important trial dealing with the double standard in terms of gender. The trial also used PMS and "tipped uterus" as both defense and prosecution arguments -- the SF Chronicle editorialized about female shootists once a month prowling the streets with pistols. It was also the first trial that women's rights activists insisted on being in the audience -- women were forbidden from the vulgarity of a murder trial in the past -- as Emily Pitts Stevens and her group of "dirty skirts" pushed past Emperor Norton to enter the courtroom. I've written about the Laura Fair case in "Cannibal Eliot, and The Lost Histories of San Francisco." At the time of "The Gilded Age" Twain was not terribly progressive when it came to women's rights. He soon changed. I'm not so sure that his opinion of the jury system changed much, though. Hilton Obenzinger