Is drunkenness a defense for murder? In the early nineteenth century, the answer was a resounding no. Intoxication was considered voluntary, and thus provided no defense. Yet as the century progressed, American courts began to extend exculpatory value to heavy drinking. The medicalization of alcohol use created new categories of mental illness which, alongside changes in the law, formed the basis for defense arguments that claimed unintended consequences and lack of criminal intent. Concurrently, advocates of prohibition cast "demon rum" and the "rum-seller" as the drunkard's accomplices in crime, mitigating offenders' actions. By the postbellum period, a backlash, led by medical professionals and an influential temperance movement, left the legacy of an unsettled legal standard.

In A Drunkard's Defense, Michele Rotunda examines a variety of court cases to explore the attitudes of nineteenth-century physicians, legal professionals, temperance advocates, and ordinary Americans toward the relationship between drunkenness, violence, and responsibility, providing broader insights into the country's complicated relationship with alcohol.

MICHELE ROTUNDA is assistant professor of history at Union County College.

"A Drunkard's Defense represents a significant contribution to historical alcohol scholarship . . . Rotunda’s conclusions about the fraught relationship between medicine and the law will be interesting to a wide range of readers beyond academic historians.”—The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

"Deeply researched and clearly written, this book opens new territory as it treats an arresting legal problem . . . Recommended."—CHOICE

"[T]his book makes the fascinating point that those favoring a broader application of alcohol-related defenses were embracing a more holistic, less individualistic notion of criminal accountability . . . this book effectively reveals the often underappreciated moral seriousness and political potential of the nineteenth-century debate over alcohol consumption."—American Historical Review

"Presenting a wealth of evidence, A Drunkard's Defense is a significant contribution, complementing other work on temperance and medical history and addressing the important and neglected topic of alcohol, murder, and the law."—Scott C. Martin, author of Devil of the Domestic Sphere: Temperance, Gender, and Middle-Class Ideology, 1800–1860

"Rotunda writes clearly and authoritatively about the controversial legal rules that allowed links between alcoholism, insanity, and violent crime in a compelling narrative that pulls together a vast literature."—Alan Rogers, author of Murder and the Death Penalty in Massachusetts