Book Review: Soul on Trial

Title: Soul on Trial

Author: Robin Cutler

Date: 2026 (second edition), 2007

Publisher: View Tree (2026), Rowman & Littlefield (2007)

ISBN: 978-0-9974823-3-1

Quote: "[W]hat might have been a small, sad tale about the death of one young man...exploded across the front pages of rural and big-city papers."

Marine Lieutenant James (Jimmie) Sutton died from a bullet in the brain. The death was reported as a suicide. Arguably it may have been one--but only in the sense that calling out the cowardice of another man, whose reply, by "fighting it out" per contemporary custom, would add two buddies and firearms to the expected fist fight, was suicidal bad judgment. 

Sutton's mother, a Catholic who believed that no one who commits suicide can go to Heaven, reported psychic messages in which Jimmie described being beaten by a "they" who "came up back of me and forced me to the ground." She did not use the word "vision" for such messages or impressions, which she had reported many times, sometimes when the messages were true. 

In spite of the inadmissible nature of her primary evidence, and the prejudice against women to which her opponents played, Mrs. Sutton eventually got an investigation that included questioning the last young people known to have seen Sutton alive and even digging up his mortal remains. The gunshot wound proved to be consistent with the claim that three other men had forced him to the ground while one shot him from behind. 

A hundred years after Sutton's death, his great-niece published the first edition of a well researched historical report on these events, including reforms made at military academies and what became of the three classmates who were involved in killing Sutton. Due to their convincing reports of mental confusion and memory loss, none was found guilty of the actual murder, but it seems likely that "conscience karma" plagued their lives. 

The "Spiritualist" or "Spiritist" movement, in which people who were losing faith in traditional church teachings accepted claims of psychic communication with the dead as scientific fact, was in active opposition to the churches of the time. Spiritualists supported Mrs. Sutton's claims and wanted to exploit them. Mrs. Sutton maintained her Catholic faith. 

The position of this web site is that we have no way to know that people don't receive psychic messages from sources beyond their own intuition--although these sources may be deceiving people about their identity, claiming to be departed friends when they are actually "deceiving spirits," as some traditional churches teach. We do know that Mrs. Sutton was a person who thought in words, and of Irish and German descent. For those who are not familiar with that combination of ethnicity and neurological "wiring," it describes people who, as Cutler observes, may "hear" intuitive warnings about loved ones so often as to become tedious. It is possible to explain these warnings as unconscious guesses that, when people are close to each other, are often right. People remember the details of an accurate premonition such as "they came up back of me and forced me to the ground" more clearly than they remember the details of other, less accurate warning messages the same person has also given loved ones. 

In any case, the Sutton story is a true mystery story, fairly described as one in which family, friends, and the victim's ghost worked together to bring the facts to light. In the nineteenth century "hazing" younger students to teach them patience, discipline, toughness, and the science of pugilism, was defended as a useful outlet for stress at least at schools for boys and men; the Sutton case was among several cases that created a demand for limits on "hazing." Freshmen are still teased and subjected to "tests" and "initiations" at many schools, and military personnel, as "fighting men," are still expected to fight, but not to the point of killing one another.