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A West Virginia Town Applied For Soviet Foreign Aid, and Other Lesser Known American History Facts

Khalid Elhassan February 21, 2020 33 min

Vulcan - McDowell County — Vulcan miners in 1919. The Sangha Kommune

9. Somnambulism as a Defense to Homicide

Kentucky Supreme Court building. WKU Public Radio

Kentucky’s Court of Appeals reversed Fain’s conviction. It held that the trial court had erred by not allowing Fain to introduce evidence by medical experts of somnambulism, or of his being a lifelong sleepwalker. The lower court had denied Fain’s request to introduce evidence that he had to be watched since infancy to prevent him from injuring himself while asleep.

Additionally, he had witnesses who were prevented from testifying that when aroused from sleep, Fain frequently got up frightened and resorted to violence as if resisting an assault. For minutes thereafter, Fain would seem unconscious of what he did or what was going around him. The appellate court concluded that if Fain had been unconscious or nearly so of what he was doing or what was being done to him, and thought he was being attacked and so resisted an attempt to kill or injure him, then he should be acquitted.

Read More: 11 Sleepwalking Killers from History.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.