Isom Bradley
27-year-old Isom Bradley lived in Texas with his girlfriend, Ada Jenkins, when one night in 1925 the couple had a conversation about an enemy of Isom named Lawrence Williams. Ada told her boyfriend about some threats Williams had uttered against him, and Isom grew increasingly alarmed by what he heard. Nervous and fearing that Williams might come for him while he slept, Isom went to bed that night with a pistol under his pillow.
Sometime in the early morning hours, Isom was startled by something, and got out of bed in a panic, convinced that an intruder was in the house to do him in. He grabbed the pistol from beneath his pillow and fired off several rounds into the dark. When he finally calmed down and lit a lamp, he discovered his girlfriend, Ada Jenkins, stone dead at the foot of their bed, having been shot multiple times.
He was arrested, charged with murder, tried, found guilty by a jury, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. However, Isom’s conviction in the lower court was reversed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on grounds that the jury had not been informed that the defendant could have fired the shots while in a somnambulistic state, and thus acted without volition.
The decision, Bradley v. State, 102 Tex. Crim. 41 (Tex. Crim. App. 1925) set the precedent that sleepwalking was a valid defense in Texas, as the state’s criminal appeals court held that a: “Somnambulist [sleepwalker] does not enjoy the free and rational exercise of his understandings and is more or less unconscious of his outward relations; none of his acts can rightfully be imputed to him as crimes.”
