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“Unwritten Law” Justified Killing Your Wife’s Lover
For a century, juries protected those who killed the seducers of their wife, sister, or daughter
In mid-19th century America, newspaper accounts of men on trial for killing their wife’s lover drew national attention captivated readers. One of the most famous was the trial of Congressman Dan Sickles for killing Philip Barton Key Jr. in Lafayette Square, across from the White House, on February 27, 1859. Key, the son of Francis Scott Key and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, was engaged in an affair with Sickles’ wife. Sickles admitted to killing Key, but the jury acquitted him.
This trial wasn’t the first time and was far from the last time, a jury disregarded criminal statutes based on their own sense of “justice.” Instead, it acted in accordance with what the New York Herald observed a year before Key’s death:
“It may be considered as the unwritten law of this country — and law understood and believed in by every one who is liable to serve on a jury — that a man may kill with impunity the seducer of his sister or the paramour of his wife.”
Technically, all criminal law is in writing. In “paramour” cases, as the courts tended to call them, a jury faithfully applying the law should convict the defendant…
