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Abstract:
This article draws on research into the science of happiness and asks a series of interrelated questions: Whether law schools can make law students happier? Whether making happier law students will translate into making them happier lawyers, and the accompanying question of whether making law students happier would create better lawyers? After covering the limitations of genetic determinants of happiness and happiness set-points, the article addresses those qualities that happiness research indicates are paramount in creating satisfaction: control, connections, creative challenge (or flow), and comparisons (preferably downward). Those qualities are then applied to legal education, while addressing the larger philosophical question, What if happiness were a goal of law schools?

The authors believe that making law students happier does translate, at least in part, into making them both happier and better lawyers because there is an interplay among happiness, collaboration and professionalism. As just one example: The people who are happier in life are those who give back. There is a distinction between feeling good, the pursuit of pleasure, and doing good, which can lead to more lasting happiness, and a life with meaning. People who have a richer sense of happiness aren't those who work on their narcissistic personal needs, but those who embrace a larger sense of civic engagement. Happily, that dovetails with pro bono obligations in law. A recent ABA survey reported that only 46% of lawyers met the ABA's goal of 50 hours of free pro bono services. Those who did meet the aspirational goal reported a direct correlation between that form of giving back and their own satisfaction.

The article concludes with some concrete suggestions about maximizing student happiness, through addressing some of the career reasons why law students become unhappy lawyers. One of these is, as Daniel Gilbert observed in his book Stumbling on Happiness, that people are bad at forecasting what will make their future selves happy. If law schools address this phenomenon of poor prediction by offering better information on not only paths of career decision-making, salary expectations, and non-practice options but also decision theory and psychological constraints on decision making, this will increase the likelihood that students will more accurately choose how to make their future selves happy.

science of happiness, happy lawyers, attorneys, law students, positive psychology, career decisions, professionalism, pro bono, attrition, optimism, control, humanizing legal education, legal education.

Abstract:
No trial provides a better basis for understanding the nature and causes of evil than do the Nuremberg trials from 1945 to 1949. Those who come to the trials expecting to find sadistic monsters are generally disappointed. What is shocking about Nuremberg is the ordinariness of the defendants: men who may be good fathers, kind to animals, even unassuming - yet who committed unspeakable crimes. Years later, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil. Like Eichmann, most Nuremberg defendants never aspired to be villains. Rather, they over-identified with an ideological cause and suffered from a lack of imagination or empathy: they couldn't fully appreciate the human consequences of their career-motivated decisions.

Twelve trials, involving over a hundred defendants and several different courts, took place in Nuremberg from 1945 to 1949. By far the most attention - not surprisingly, given the figures involved - has focused on the first Nuremberg trial of twenty-one major war criminals. Several of the eleven subsequent Nuremberg trials, however, involved conduct no less troubling - and issues at least as interesting - as the Major War Criminals Trial. For example, the trial of sixteen German judges and officials of the Reich Ministry (The Justice Trial) considered the criminal responsibility of judges who enforce immoral laws. (The Justice Trial became the inspiration for the acclaimed Hollywood movie, Judgment at Nuremberg.) Other subsequent trials, such as the Doctors Trial and the Einsatzgruppen Trial, are especially compelling because of the horrific events described by prosecution witnesses.

Famous Trials, Trial, Nuremberg, Nazi, Nazis, War crimes, War criminals, Justice Trial, Doctors Trial, Einsatzgruppen, Robert Jackson, Rudolph Hess, Hermann Goering, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Rosenberg, General Alfred Jodl, Albert Speer

Abstract:
The trial and execution of Socrates in Athens in 399 B.C.E. puzzles historians. Why, in a society enjoying more freedom and democracy than any the world had ever seen, would a seventy-year-old philosopher be put to death for what he was teaching? The puzzle is all the greater because Socrates had taught - without molestation - all of his adult life. What could Socrates have said or done than prompted a jury of 500 Athenians to send him to his death just a few years before he would have died naturally?

Finding an answer to the mystery of the trial of Socrates is complicated by the fact that the two surviving accounts of the defense (or apology) of Socrates both come from disciples of his, Plato and Xenophon. Historians suspect that Plato and Xenophon, intent on showing their master in a favorable light, failed to present in their accounts the most damning evidence against Socrates.

What appears almost certain is that the decisions to prosecute and ultimately convict Socrates had a lot to do with the turbulent history of Athens in the several years preceding his trial. An examination of that history may not provide final answers, but it does provide important clues.

Famous Trials, Trial, Socrates, Athens, Athenians, Greeks, Philosopher, Plato, Xenophon, Golden Age of Greece, Hemlock

Abstract:
No crime in American history - let alone a crime that never occurred - produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on a Southern Railroad freight run on March 25, 1931. Over the course of the two decades that followed, the struggle for justice of the Scottsboro Boys, as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives, produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America's political left.

Famous Trials, Trial, Scottsboro, Scottsboro Boys, NAACP, Clarence Darrow, Powell vs. Alabama, Competent legal counsel, Samuel Liebowitz, Norris vs. Alabama

Abstract:
In the annals of crime, there might never have been a more bizarre motive for killing than that revealed in the 1970-71 trial of four Manson Family members. In the twisted mind of thirty-four-year-old Charles Manson, a wave of bloody killings of high-society types in Los Angeles would be the spark that would set off a revolution by blacks against the white establishment. When blackie, as Manson called black people, proved unable to govern, they would turn to Manson and his tribe of followers, who would have survived Helter Skelter by hiding out in an underground cave in the Death Valley area of California while the chaos raged above.

Manson's vision never materialized. Instead, he and several of his followers found themselves convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in one of the strangest trials the strange state of California has ever witnessed.

Famous Trials, Trial, Manson, Charles Manson, Helter Skelter, Sharon Tate, Tate, Manson Family, LaBianca, Vincent Bugliosi, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, Linda Kasabian, Charles Tex Watson

Abstract:
From June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging. Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft. Dozens languished in jail for months without trials. Then, almost as soon as it had begun, the hysteria that swept through Puritan Massachusetts ended. Why did this travesty of justice occur? Why did it occur in Salem? Nothing about this tragedy was inevitable. Only an unfortunate combination of an ongoing frontier war, economic conditions, congregational strife, teenage boredom, and personal jealousies can account for the spiraling accusations, trials, and executions that occurred in the spring and summer of 1692.

Famous Trials, Trial, Witchcraft, Witchhunt, Witch, Witches, Salem, Massachusetts, Puritan, Puritans, Cotton Mather, The Crucible

Abstract:
On August 17, 1980, at a campsite near Australia's famous Ayer's Rock, a mother's cry came out of the dark: My God, my God, the dingo's got my baby! Soon the people of an entire continent would be choosing sides in a debate over whether the cry heard that night marked an astonishing and rare human fatality caused by Australia's wild dogs or was, rather, in the words of the man who would eventually prosecute her for murder, a calculated, fanciful lie. A jury of nine men and three women came to believe the latter story and convicted Lindy Chamberlain for the murder of her ten-week-old daughter, Azaria.

Three years later, while Lindy dealt with daily life in a Darwin prison, police investigating the death of a fallen climber discovered Azaria's matinee jacket near a dingo den, and the Australian public confronted the reality that its justice system had failed. A Cry in the Dark, a movie starring Meryl Streep, carried the story of Lindy's wrongful conviction across oceans. What went wrong? Convictions of the innocent usually result from inaccurate eyewitness testimony (generally the least reliable evidence in a trial because of biases and the tricks of memory), but Lindy Chamberlain was convicted by flawed forensic evidence and by investigators and prosecutors unwilling to reconsider their assumptions in the face of contradictory evidence. The trial of Lindy Chamberlain, and her husband Michael, is a cautionary tale that everyone who practices forensic science should carefully consider.

Famous Trials, Trial, Chamberlain, Lindy Chamberlain, Ayer's Rock, Australia, Dingo, Wild Dogs, Azaria, A Cry in the Dark, Forensic evidence, Forensic science, Forensic medicine, Forensic

Abstract:
There is much to learn from the story of how the head of one of the most revered men in England, Sir Thomas More, ended up on the chopping block on London's Tower Hill in 1535. Few people in history have faced their trials and deaths as squarely, calmly, and with as much integrity as did More. More's road from his post as Lord Chancellor of England to the Tower of London owes its course to a Bible passage, a marriage of a long-dead prince, and the consuming desire of lustful and vain-glorious King Henry VIII to marry Anne Boleyn. Swept along with More, in this fateful confluence of writings, events, and people, was nothing less than the Reformation.

Famous Trials, Trial, Thomas More, Henry VIII, Henry the Eighth, Anne Bolyn, Tower of London, Divorce, Catholic Church, Pope, Annulment, Reformation, Church of England, Catherine of Aragon, Lord Chancellor, Wolsey

Abstract:
It was an old-fashioned lynching, carried out with the help of county officials, that came to symbolize hardcore resistance to integration. Dead were three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney. All three shot in the dark of night on a lonely road in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Many people predicted such a tragedy when the Mississippi Summer Project, an effort that would bring hundreds of college-age volunteers to the most totalitarian state in the country was announced in April, 1964. The FBI's all-out search for the conspirators who killed the three young men, depicted in the movie Mississippi Burning, was successful, leading three years later to a trial in the courtroom of one of America's most determined segregationist judges.

Famous Trials, Trial, Mississippi, Mississippi Burning, Civil rights, Schwerner, Goodman, Chaney, Segregation, Integration, KKK, Ku Klux Klan, Klan, Mississippi Summer Project, CORE, Philadelphia, Mississippi

Abstract:
Providing an account of the trial of Jesus presents challenges unlike that for any of the other trials on the Famous Trials Website. First, there is the challenge of determining what actually happened nearly 2,000 years ago before the Sanhedrin and the Roman prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate. The task is daunting because almost our entire understanding of events comes from five divergent accounts, each of which was written by a Christian (who did not witness the final days of Jesus directly) for a distinct audience from fifteen (at least) to seventy years after the trial. Second, there is the challenge that comes from knowing that readers of this account are likely to have prior understandings of trial events that come from their own religious training - and that any account of the trial provided here that varies substantially from these prior understandings may not be easily accepted. Nonetheless, I believe the trial of Jesus merits analysis for the simple reason that no other trial in human history has so significantly affected the course of human events.

Famous Trials, Trial, Jesus, Christ, Christian, Roman, Pontius, Pilate, Judea, Sanhedrin, Jerusalem, Jews, Jewish, Galilee

Abstract:
When an anarchist - whose identity remains a mystery even today - tossed a homemade bomb into a great company of Chicago police at 10:20 P.M. on the night of May 4, 1886, he could not have appreciated the far reaching consequences his reckless action would have. His bomb, thrown in a light drizzle as the last speaker at a labor rally climbed down from the speaker's wagon, set off a frenzy of fire from police pistols that would leave eight officers and an unknown number of civilians dead, and scores more injured. It led to the nation's first Red Scare, refocused national labor and immigration policy, and set the stage for one of the most infamous trials in the history of American jurisprudence. The Haymarket Trial, the cause celebre for American radicals in the 1880s, produced death sentences for seven of Chicago's most prominent labor leaders - convicted more for their words than deeds at a time when the First Amendment provided scant protection against an outraged public.

Famous Trials, Trial, Anarchist, Anarchism, Chicago, Haymarket, Labor, Union, Red Scare, Immigrants, Workers

Abstract:
What did it all mean? Was the Chicago Seven Trial merely, as one commentator suggested, a monumental non-event? Was it, as others argue, an important battle for the hearts and minds of the American people? Or is it best seen as a symbol of the conflicts of values that characterized the late sixties? These are some of the questions that surround one of the most unusual courtroom spectacles in American history, the 1969-70 trial of seven radicals accused of conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Culturally and politically, 1968 was one of the most turbulent years America has ever seen. Two groups met to discuss using the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago to highlight their opposition to the Vietnam War and establishment values. Although there was some loose coordination between the two groups, they had different leadership, different agendas, and favored different forms of protest and demonstrations. The more politically focused of the two groups was the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE). The group more focused on promoting an uninhibited lifestyle was the Youth International Party (YIPPIES). In addition to these two groups, organizations such as the Black Panther Party and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference also planned to have representatives in Chicago to press their complaints concerning racism in American policies and politics.

Until enactment of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, rioting and incitement to riot was a strictly local law enforcement issue. Congress, however, felt compelled to respond to the ever-increasing numbers of anti-war protests around the country. The new law made it a federal crime to cross state lines with the intent to incite a riot. Even after passage of the law, Attorney General Ramsey Clark and the Justice Department were reluctant to enforce the new provisions. Clark viewed what had happened in Chicago as primarily a police riot. The Attorney General expressed more interest in prosecuting police officers for brutality than in prosecuting demonstrators for rioting.

The Justice Department's lack of interest in prosecuting protest leaders outraged Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Daley convinced a close friend and federal judge, William Campbell, to summon a grand jury to consider possible violations of the anti-riot law. On March 20, 1969, the jury returned indictments against eight demonstrators, balanced exactly by indictments against eight police officers. The eight indicted demonstrators included Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale. By the time the grand jury returned its indictments, the Nixon Administration had begun. The new attorney general, John Mitchell, exhibited none of his predecessor's reluctance about prosecuting demonstrators. Mitchell gave the green light to prosecute.

Famous Trials, Trial, Chicago Seven, Democratic National Convention, Vietnam, Protests, Protestors, Riot, Police Riot, Chicago, Mayor Daley, Richard Daley, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Joh Froines, Lee Weiner, Bobby Seale, Yippies, Black Panther Party

Abstract:
Two dramatic criminal trials, one for rape and one for murder and both involving multiple defendants, forever changed the nature of Hawaiian race relations and politics. Filled with twists and turns and unanswered questions, the trials have all the elements of a good mystery. The second of the so-called Massie Affair trials also closes out the courtroom career of America's greatest defense attorney, Clarence Darrow. No trials ever had a more significant effect on a state's history than those that shocked and shook Hawaii in 1931 and 1932.

Famous Trials, Trial, Thalia Massie, Massie, Clarence Darrow, Hawaii, Rape, Murder, Honor Killings

Abstract:
"Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one." Actually the Bordens received only 29 whacks, not the 81 suggested by the famous ditty, but the popularity of the poem is a testament to the public's fascination with the 1893 murder trial of Lizzie Borden. The source of that fascination might lie in the almost unimaginably brutal nature of the crime - given the sex, background, and age of the defendant - or in the jury's acquittal of Lizzie in the face of prosecution evidence that most historians today find compelling.

Famous Trials, Trial, Lizzie, Borden, Axe, Whacks, Murder, Fall River

Abstract:
Galileo Galilei was born in 1564 - the same year that Shakespeare was born and Michelangelo died. From an early age, Galileo showed his scientific skills. At age nineteen, he discovered the isochronism of the pendulum. By age twenty-two, he had invented the hydrostatic balance. By age twenty-five, Galileo assumed his first lectureship, at the University of Pisa. Within a few more years, Galileo earned a reputation throughout Europe as a scientist and superb lecturer. Eventually, he would be recognized as the father of experimental physics. Galileo's motto might have been follow knowledge wherever it leads us. In the 1633 trial of Galileo Galilei, two worlds come into cosmic conflict. Galileo's world of science and humanism collides with the world of Scholasticism and absolutism that held power in the Catholic Church. The result is a tragedy that marks both the end of Galileo's liberty and the end of the Italian Renaissance.

Famous Trials, Trial, Galileo, Science, Physics, Astronomy, Catholic Church, Church, Copernicus, Sun, Earth, Center of the Universe, Telescope, Inquisition

Abstract:
The players on Charles Comiskey's 1919 Chicago White Sox team were a fractious lot with plenty to complain about. The club was divided into two gangs of players, each with practically nothing to say to the other. Together they formed the best team in baseball -- perhaps one of the best teams that ever played the game -- yet they were paid a fraction of what many players on other teams received. Comiskey's contributions to baseball were beyond question, but he was both a tightwad and a tyrant. The White Sox owner paid two of his greatest stars, outfielder Shoeless Joe Jackson and third baseman Buck Weaver $6000 a year, despite the fact that players on other teams with half their talent were getting $10,000 or more. On road trips, Sox players received a $3 a day allowance, even though almost all other teams gave their players $4. For Sox pitcher Eddie Cicotte, there was another source of irritation: in the fall of 1917, when Cicotte approached a 30-win season that would win him a promised $10,000 bonus, Comiskey had his star pitcher benched rather than be forced to come up with the extra cash. The players had few options in dealing with their penurious owner. Because of baseball's famous reserve clause, any player who refused to accept a contract was prohibited from playing baseball on any other professional team.

The bitterness Sox players felt for their owner led eight members of the team to enter into a conspiracy that would forever change the game of baseball and be remembered as the greatest scandal in the history of professional sports. They would agree to throw the World Series.

Famous Trials, Trial, Comiskey, Chicago, White Sox, Black Sox, Baseball, World Series, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Gambling, Gamblers, Fix, Sport Sullivan, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Commissioner of Baseball

Abstract:
The discovery of the body of a thirteen-year-old girl in the basement of an Atlanta pencil factory where she had gone to collect her pay check shocked the citizens of that crime-ravaged southern city and roused its public officials to find a suspect and secure a conviction. Unfortunately, it now seems, events and the South's anti-Semitism conspired to lead to the conviction of the wrong man, the factory's Jewish superintendent, Leo Frank. The case ultimately drew the attention of the United States Supreme Court and the Governor of Georgia, but neither the Constitution nor a Governor's commutation could spare Frank a violent death at the end of rope strung from a Georgia oak tree.

Leo Frank, Mary Phagan, Anti-Semitism, Georgia, Lynching, Lynch, Jewish, Anti-Defamation League

Abstract:
Old Bailey, the main courthouse in London, had never presented a show quite like the three trials that captivated England and much of the literary world in the spring of 1895. Celebrity, sex, witty dialogue, political intrigue, surprising twists, and important issues of art and morality - is it any surprise that the trials of Oscar Wilde continue to fascinate one hundred years after the death of one of the world's greatest authors and playwrights?

Famous Trials, Trial, Wilde, Oscar Wilde, Libel, Homosexual, Homosexuality, Sodomy, Queensberry, Marquess, Alfred Douglas, Portrait of Dorian Gray, Phrases and Philosophies for Use of the Young, The love that dare not speak its name

Abstract:
Few trial transcripts are as likely to bring tears to the eyes as that of the 1924 murder trial of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold. Decades after Clarence Darrow delivered his twelve-hour long plea to save his young clients' lives, his moving summation stands as the most eloquent attack on the death penalty ever delivered in an American courtroom. Mixing poetry and prose, science and emotion, a world-weary cynicism and a dedication to his cause, hatred of bloodlust and love of man, Darrow takes his audience on an oratorical ride that would be unimaginable in a criminal trial today. Even without Darrow in his prime, the Leopold and Loeb trial has the elements to justify its billing as the first trial of the century. It is not surprising that the public responded to a trial that involved the kidnapping and murder of a fourteen-year old boy from one of Chicago's most prominent families, a bizarre relationship between two promising scholars-turned-murderers, what the prosecutor called an act of Providence leading to the apprehension of the teenage defendants, dueling psychiatrists, and an experienced and sharp-tongued state's attorney bent on hanging the confessed killers in spite of their relative youth.

Famous Trials, Trial, Leopold, Loeb, Clarence Darrow, Death penalty, Trial of the century, Kidnapping, Murder, Chicago, Friedrich Nietzsche, Superman, Bobby Franks

Abstract:
By modern standards, the North-West Rebellion seems no big deal. Canadian forces easily quelled the uprising of a couple of hundred Metis settlers along the South Saskatchewan River. A majority of Metis in the region sat out the fighting, and only about one hundred persons died in the conflict. (Although that figure of one hundred deaths was significant in this sparsely populated region.) The importance of the North-West Rebellion, apart from establishing the ability of Canadian government to successfully carry out a military action far from its center of power, is symbolic. As has been often noted by historians, the debate over the North-West Rebellion and the subsequent trial of Louis Riel reveals the tensions that continue to distinguish Canada: east versus west, native versus non-native, French-speaking versus English-speaking, American versus Canadian. Over time, Louis Riel has been seen as a demagogic madman, as an innocent victim of Prime Minister John Macdonald's fanaticism, or as a martyred national-liberation leader. None of these characterizations is entirely accurate; each contains some measure of truth. The North-West Rebellion and the trial of Louis Riel is best understood as the product of a particular place and time: the Canadian frontier, in a time when civilization and its institutions confronted the traditions of a more primitive people.

Famous Trials, Trial, Louis Riel, Canada, Canadian, North-West Rebellion, John Macdonald, Saskatchewan River, Metis, Hudson Bay Company, Regina

Abstract:
The Rosenberg Trial is the sum of many stories: a story of betrayal, a love story, a spy story, a story of a family torn apart, and a story of government overreaching. As is the case with many famous trials, it is also the story of a particular time: the early 1950's with its cold war tensions and headlines dominated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his demagogic tactics.

The Manhattan Project was the name given to the top-secret effort of Allied scientists to develop an atomic bomb. One of the Manhattan Project scientists working in Los Alamos was a British physicist named Klaus Fuchs. Twice in 1945 Fuchs met with a Soviet agent named Raymond and provided notes on the working design for the atomic bomb.

In February 1950, less than two weeks after a jury convicted Alger Hiss of perjury for denying under oath that he had passed secret information to a Communist agent named Whittaker Chambers, Klaus Fuchs was arrested and confessed to disclosing to the Soviets information about the Manhattan Project. One week after Fuchs' arrest, Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin propelled himself into the headlines by charging that the State Department employed over 200 Communist agents. It was a bad time to be a suspected Communist; it was a terrible time to be a suspected spy.

Fuchs' arrest, which began the chain of investigations that led authorities to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, was made possible by American cryptanalysts who successfully deciphered intercepted cables (the Venona Cables) from the Soviet Consulate to the KGB. One cable was a report by Fuchs on the progress of the Manhattan Project. When confronted with evidence of his espionage, Klaus confessed and told authorities of his meetings with a spy he knew only as Raymond. Within three months, the FBI began to focus on a pudgy, middle-aged chemist, Harry Gold, as the Raymond to whom Fuchs had given information about the bomb. Within a week after the FBI first began to ask Gold questions such as "Were you ever west of the Mississippi?", Gold offered a voluntary confession.

By June 1, authorities knew of a soldier, stationed at Los Alamos, married with no children, who Gold paid $500 to in September of 1945 in Albuquerque in exchange for information about the implosion lens for the atomic bomb. Gold could not remember the soldier's name, but thought his wife may have been Ruth and that he was a New York City native. Within two days, Gold was shown a picture of a man meeting the description he had given. The man pictured was David Greenglass. Gold told investigators that Greenglass resembled the man he met in New Mexico.

On June 15, 1950, FBI officials questioned David Greenglass. In his first interview, Greenglass admitted that he was the machinist-soldier stationed in Los Alamos that had passed information to Gold. He also identified his wife, Ruth, and his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, as participants in the Soviet spy ring.

Famous Trials, Trial, Rosenbergs, Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, Espionage, Soviet Union, Soviets, Communist, Communism, Joseph McCarthy, Manhattan Project, Atomic Bomb, Whittaker Chambers, Cold War, Klaus Fuchs

Abstract:
On July 4, 1954, Marilyn Sheppard, the wife of a handsome thirty-year-old doctor, Sam Sheppard, was brutally murdered in the bedroom of their home in Bay Village, Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie. Sam Sheppard denied any involvement in the murder and described his own battle with the killer he described as bushy-haired.

Did Sam do it? It's rare for a murder mystery to endure for over half a century. Almost always, if the mystery is not fully resolved at the trial, subsequent admissions, previously uncovered clues, or more sophisticated forensic tests reveal what the trial did not. Not so with the Sam Sheppard case. Facing two different juries, twelve years apart, Sam Sheppard was found guilty by one jury, not guilty by the next. Even over the past decade, partisans continued the debate. A third jury in 2000, asked to consider awarding the Sheppard family damages for wrongful imprisonment, sided with county prosecutors. In 2001, a book on the Sheppard case concluded that Sam was clearly innocent. Two years later, another book on the case argued just as forcefully that the first jury got it right: Sam was guilty as charged.

Apart from the large unanswered question of guilt, the Sheppard case deserves to be considered among the nation's most famous because it produced a landmark U. S. Supreme Court decision on fair trial rights and launched the career of a flamboyant young defense attorney named F. Lee Bailey. The case is also is remarkable for the unlikely collection of notable figures that touched the case, including columnist and quiz show star Dorothy Kilgallen, Cleveland Browns quarterback and NFL Hall-of-Fame member Otto Graham, and chief Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels. The case also was widely associated with a popular early 60s' television show, The Fugitive.

Famous Trials, Trial, Marilyn Sheppard, Sam Sheppard, Murder, Fair trial, F. Lee Bailey, The Fugitive

Abstract:
Journalist H. L. Mencken called the trial of Bruno Hauptmann, the accused kidnapper of the baby of aviator Charles Lindbergh, the greatest story since the Resurrection. While Mencken's description is doubtless an exaggeration, measured by the public interest it generated, the Hauptmann trial stands with the O. J. Simpson and Scopes trials as among the most famous trials of the twentieth century. The trial featured America's greatest hero, a good mystery involving ransom notes and voices in dark cemeteries, a crime that is every parent's worst nightmare, and a German-born defendant who fought against U. S. forces in World War I.

Famous Trials, Trial, Hauptmann, Bruno Hauptmann, Charles Lindbergh, Lindbergh, Kidnapping, Kidnapped, Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Ransom, Samuel Liebowitz

Abstract:
In 1999, for only the second time in United States history, the Senate conducted an impeachment trial of a President. The acquittal of William Jefferson Clinton on February 12 came as no great surprise, given the near party-line vote on impeachment charges in the House of Representatives leading to the trial.

The impeachment saga of President Clinton has its origins in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought in Arkansas in May, 1994 by Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee. Lawyers for Clinton argued that the Jones suit would distract him from the important tasks of his office and should not be allowed to go forward while he occupied the White House. Clinton's immunity claim eventually reached the United States Supreme Court. The Court ruled unanimously in May, 1997 against the President, and allowed discovery in the case to proceed. As a result of the Supreme Court's action, Judge Susan Weber Wright allowed discovery to proceed in the Paula Jones lawsuit. Judge Wright ruled that lawyers for Jones, in order to help prove her sexual harassment claim, could inquire into any sexual relationships that Clinton might have with subordinates either as Governor of Arkansas or as President of the United States. A critical moment in the cascade of events that would eventually lead to impeachment came on December 5, 1997 when Jones's lawyers submitted a list of women that they would like to depose. Included on the list the name of Monica Lewinsky.

This is a trial that never should have happened. Clinton should have reached an early settlement (or defaulted) in his suit with Jones, which would have happened if he'd been honest with his own lawyers about his sexual history. The Supreme Court should have struck down the independent counsel law as a violation of separation of powers when it had a chance to do so in 1988. The Supreme Court missed a second chance to prevent impeachment when it failed to recognize, in Clinton v. Jones, that civil suits against a sitting president had the serious potential to be a major distraction from the president's duties. Clinton should not have trusted Lewinsky to be discreet. Kenneth Starr should not have engaged in a sting operation against the President of the United States, and the Administration should not have engaged in an operation to trash the OIC. Finally, of course, the President should not have lied under oath about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Despite its predictable outcome, the impeachment trial of President Clinton is well worth studying, both for what it says about the failure of the judiciary and political institutions to respond adequately to an unprecedented situation, and what it tells us about the failures of Bill Clinton, the all-too-human occupant of the nation's highest office. The trial also raises fascinating questions about the distinction between public morality and private morality.

Famous Trials, Trial, Impeach, Impeachment, Clinton, President Clinton, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Kenneth Starr, Sexual harassment, Independent Counsel, Tom De Lay, Newt Gingrich

Abstract:
The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history, should serve as a cautionary tale. When it was all over, the government had spent seven years and $15 million dollars investigating and prosecuting a case that led to no convictions. More seriously, the McMartin case left in its wake hundreds of emotionally damaged children, as well as ruined careers for members of the McMartin staff. No one paid a bigger price than Ray Buckey, one of the principal defendants in the case, who spent five years in jail awaiting trial for a crime (most people recognize today) he never committed. McMartin juror Brenda Williams said that the trial experience taught her to be more cautious: I now realize how easily something can be said and misinterpreted and blown out of proportion. Another juror, Mark Bassett, singled out experts for blame: I thought some of the expert testimony about the children told you more about the expert than the child. I mean, if the expert says children are always 100% believable and then you have a child who is not believable, either the expert is extremely biased or they've never seen anything like that child before.

The McMartin trial had its origins in a call placed to police in Manhattan Beach, California by Judy Johnson, the mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old son who attended the McMartin Preschool on about ten occasions in 1983. Johnson told Detective Jane Hoag that a school aide, Ray Buckey, the 25-year-old son of the owner of the preschool, had molested her son. Despite the fact that the young boy was unable to identify Ray from photos and medical investigations of the boy showed no signs of sexual abuse, the police conducted searches of Buckey's home, confiscating such evidence as a rubber duck, a graduation robe, and Playboy magazines. Detective Hoag arrested Buckey on September 7, 1983.

On March 22, 1984, a grand jury indicted Ray Buckey, Peggy Buckey (Ray's mother), Peggy Ann Buckey (Ray's sister), Virginia McMartin (founder of the preschool thirty years earlier), and three other McMartin teachers, Mary Ann Jackson, Bette Raidor, and Babette Spitler. The grand jury initially indicted the McMartin Seven on 115 counts of child sexual abuse. Two months later, and additional 93 indictment counts were added, as District Attorney Robert Philobosian pursued his strategy of hyping the McMartin case to boost his chances in an upcoming primary election. In June, bail for Peggy Buckey was set at one million dollars. Ray Buckey was held without bail.

There are many lessons to be learned from the McMartin Preschool Trial. There are lessons for police and prosecutors, but there are also lessons for the media. It was pack journalism - slanted heavily toward the prosecution, providing sensational headlines day after day, almost never seriously questioning the allegations - that turned the McMartin trial into the expensive and damaging fiasco that it became.

Famous Trials, Trial, McMartin, McMartin Preschool, Ray Buckey, Child abuse, Child sexual abuse, Sexual abuse, Pack journalism, Children's Institute International

Abstract:
A bomb carried in a Ryder truck exploded in front of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City at 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995. The bomb claimed 168 innocent lives. That a homegrown, war-decorated American terrorist named Timothy McVeigh drove and parked the Ryder truck in the handicap zone in front of the Murrah Building there is little doubt. In 1997, a jury convicted McVeigh and sentenced him to death. The federal government, after an investigation involving 2,000 agents, also charged two of McVeigh's army buddies, Michael Fortier and Terry Nichols, with advance knowledge of the bombing and participation in the plot. Despite considerable evidence linking various militant white supremacists to the tragedy in Oklahoma City, no other persons faced prosecution for what was - until September 11, 2001 - the worst act of terrorism ever on American soil.

The Oklahoma City bombing trials raise questions more interesting than the answers they provide. How, in four years, can an army sergeant and Green Beret aspirant turn so violently against the government he served? If there had been no Waco, would there have been no Oklahoma City? Did McVeigh want to be captured? Why did the government only bring charges against three men in connection with the bombing, when compelling evidence suggests that others played significant roles in the crime? We do not have clear answers to any of these questions - but some possible answers to these and other intriguing questions have come into better focus in the years since the McVeigh and Nichols trials.

Famous Trials, Trial, Timothy McVeigh, McVeigh, Oklahoma City Bombing, Murrah Federal Building, Michael Fortier, Terry Nichols, Militant, Militia, White supremacists, Terrorist, Terrorism, Truck bomb, Fertilizer, Aryan Republican Army, April 19, Waco, Branch Davidian

Abstract:
It was a warm spring Saturday in New York City, March 25, 1911. On the top three floors of the ten-story Asch Building just off of Washington Square, employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory began putting away their work as the 4:45 p.m. quitting time approached. Most of the several hundred Triangle Shirtwaist employees were teenage girls. Most were recent immigrants. Many spoke only a little English.

Just then somebody on the eighth floor shouted, Fire! Flames leapt from discarded rags between the first and second rows of cutting tables in the hundred-foot-by-hundred-foot floor. Triangle employee William Bernstein grabbed pails of water and vainly attempted to put the fire out. As a line of hanging patterns began to burn, cries of fire erupted from all over the floor. In the thickening smoke, as several men continued to fling water at the fire, the fire spread everywhere - to the tables, the wooden floor trim, the partitions, the ceiling. A shipping clerk dragged a hose in the stairwell into the rapidly heating room, but nothing came - no pressure. Terrified and screaming, girls climbed through streamed down the narrow fire escape and Washington Place stairway or jammed into the single passenger elevator.

In the hell of the ninth-floor, 145 employees, mostly young women, would die. Those that acted quickly made it through the Greene Street stairs, climbed down a rickety fire escape before it collapsed, or squeezed into the small Washington Place elevators before they stopped running. The last person on the last elevator to leave the ninth floor was Katie Weiner, who grabbed a cable that ran through the elevator and swung in, landing on the heads of other girls. A few other girls survived by jumping into the elevator shaft, and landing on the roof of the elevator compartment as it made its final descent. The weight of the girls caused the car to sink to the bottom of the shaft, leaving it immobile. For those left on the ninth floor, forced to choose between an advancing inferno and jumping to the sidewalks below, many would jump. Others, according to survivor Ethel Monick, became frozen with fear and never moved.

Two weeks after the fire, a grand jury indicted Triangle Shirtwaist owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanck on charges of manslaughter.

Famous Trials, Trial, Triangle Shirtwaist, Garment workers, Immigrant, Women, Fire, Labor law, Workplace, Safety, Frances Perkins, Department of Labor

Abstract:
The early 1920s found social patterns in chaos. Traditionalists, the older Victorians, worried that everything valuable was ending. Younger modernists no longer asked whether society would approve of their behavior, only whether their behavior met the approval of their intellect. Intellectual experimentation flourished. Americans danced to the sound of the Jazz Age, showed their contempt for alcoholic prohibition, debated abstract art and Freudian theories. In a response to the new social patterns set in motion by modernism, a wave of revivalism developed, becoming especially strong in the American South.

Who would dominate American culture -- the modernists or the traditionalists? Journalists were looking for a showdown, and they found one in a Dayton, Tennessee courtroom in the summer of 1925. There a jury was to decide the fate of John Scopes, a high school biology teacher charged with illegally teaching the theory of evolution. The guilt or innocence of John Scopes, and even the constitutionality of Tennessee's anti-evolution statute, mattered little. The meaning of the trial emerged through its interpretation as a conflict of social and intellectual values.

Famous Trials, Trial, Scopes, Monkey Trial, Evolution, Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, Dayton Tennessee, Bible, Darwin, H.L. Mencken, ACLU, Genesis

Abstract:
For President Abraham Lincoln, things looked brighter on Friday, April 14, 1865 than they had for a long time. Five days earlier, General Robert E. Lee effectively ended the long nightmare of the Civil War by surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia, and just the previous day, the city of Washington celebrated the war's end by illuminating every one of its public building with candles. Candles also burned in most private homes, causing a city paper to describe the nation's capital as all ablaze with glory. The President decided he could finally afford an evening of relaxation: he would attend a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in downtown Washington.

On May 1, 1865, President Johnson issued an order that the alleged conspirators be tried before a nine-person military commission. Testimony began in the Lincoln assassination conspiracy trial on May 12, just three days after the prisoners were first asked if they would like to have legal counsel. The rules of the Commission made the position of the defendants even more grave: conviction could come on a simple majority vote and a majority of two-thirds could impose the death sentence. Over the course of the next seven weeks, the Commission would hear from 361 witnesses. As the witnesses paraded to the stand, spectators lucky enough to get admission passes from Major General Hunter would move in and out of the nonchalant atmosphere of the courtroom.

Famous Trials, Trial, Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, Surratt, Andrew Johnson, Stanton, Edwin Stanton, William Seward, Samuel Mudd, Confederacy, Civil War

Abstract:
The verdict of not guilty for reason of insanity in the 1982 trial of John Hinckley, Jr. for his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan stunned and outraged many Americans. An ABC News poll taken the day after the verdict showed 83% of those polled thought justice was not done in the Hinckley case. Some people - without much evidence - attributed the verdict to an anti-Reagan bias on the part the Washington, D. C. jury of eleven blacks and one white. Many more people, however, blamed a legal system that they claimed made it too easy for juries to return not guilty verdicts in insanity cases - despite the fact that such pleas were made in only 2% of felony cases and failed over 75% of the time. Public pressure resulting from the Hinckley verdict spurred Congress and most states into enacting major reforms of laws governing the use of the insanity defense.

The Hinckley trial highlights the difficulty of a system that forces jurors to label a defendant either sane or insane when the defendant may in fact be close to the middle on a spectrum ranging from Star Trek's Mr. Spock to the person who strangles his wife thinking that he's squeezing a grapefruit. Any objective evaluation of John Hinckley's mental condition shows him to be a troubled young man - not, as one prosecution witness described him, a normal, All-American boy. But how troubled? The prosecution contended that Hinckley suffered only from personality disorders of the type affecting five to ten percent of the population, whereas the defense saw the same evidence as demonstrating Hinckley's serious mental illness.

The Hinckley trial, perhaps better than any other famous trial, reveals the difficulty of ascertaining what exactly is going on in the head of another human being - and then in using that imperfect knowledge to answer a legal question that reduces complex and changing mental states to two oversimplified categories.

Famous Trials, Trial, John Hinckley, Hinckley, Ronald Reagan, President Reagan, Reagan, Assassination, Sane, Insane, Insanity, Insanity defense, Mental illness, Mental defect, Mental disease, Taxi Driver, Jodie Foster, James Brady

Abstract:
The causes of the Dakota Conflict are many and complex. The treaties of 1851 and 1858 contributed to tensions by undermining the Dakota culture and the power of chieftains, concentrating malcontents, and leading to a corrupt system of Indian agents and traders. Annuity payments reduced the once proud Dakota to the status of dependents. Annuity payments for the Dakota were late in the summer of 1862. On Sunday, August 17, four Dakota from a breakaway band of young malcontents were on a hunting trip when they came across some eggs in a hen's nest along the fence line of a settler's homestead. When one of the four took the eggs, another of the group warned him that the eggs belonged to a white man. The first young man became angry, dashed the eggs to the ground, and accused the other of being afraid of white men, even though half-starved. Apparently to disprove the accusation of cowardice, the other Dakota said that to show he was not afraid of white men he would go the house and shoot the owner. He challenged the others to join him. Minutes later three white men, a white woman, and a fifteen-year old white girl lay dead. Events moved quickly. Forty-four Americans were killed and another ten captured in the first full day of fighting in and around the Lower Agency at Redwood. Nearly two hundred additional whites died over the next few days as Dakota massacred farm families and attacked Fort Ridgely and the town of New Ulm.

By mid-September, the initiative had shifted to the American forces. Penned in to the north and south, facing severe food shortages and declining morale, many Dakota warriors chose to surrender. Together with those taken captive, the ranks of Dakota prisoners soon swelled to 1,250. A decision had to be made soon what to do with them.

The trials were quick affairs, getting quicker as they progressed. The commission heard nearly forty cases on November 3, the last day it met. The commission believed that mere participation in a battle justified a death sentence, so in the many cases, perhaps two-thirds of the total, where the prisoner admitted firing shots it proceeded to a guilty verdict in a matter of a few minutes. The final decision on whether to go ahead with the planned mass execution of the 303 Dakota and mixed-bloods rested with President Lincoln. Lincoln asked his clerks to search the records and identify those convicted of participating in the massacres of settlers. The clerks came up with the thirty-nine names included in Lincoln's handwritten order of execution written on December 6, 1862.

Famous Trials, Trial, Acton, Dakota, Dakotas, Indians, Indian agents, Sioux

Abstract:
Sacco and Vanzetti: for a generation of Americans, the names of the two Italian anarchists are forever linked. Questions surrounding their 1921 trial for the murders of a paymaster and his guard bitterly divided a nation. As the two convicted men and their supporters struggled on through appellate courts and clemency petitions to avoid the electric chair, public interest in their case continued to grow. As the end drew near, in August 1927, hundreds of thousands of people - from Boston and New York to London and Buenos Aires - took to the streets in protest of what they perceived to be a massive miscarriage of justice.

From the time of their conviction until decades after their deaths, people lined up in one of two camps: one camp of those believing that Sacco and Vanzetti were the innocent victims of political and economic interests determined to send a message about the rising tide of anarchist violence and another camp of those believing that the trial was fair and that the two murderers got what they deserved. A third possibility, that one of the two men might have been guilty and the other innocent, received little or no attention until a ballistics test in 1961 provided strong evidence that Sacco did indeed fire a fatal bullet on that April day long ago in South Braintree, Massachusetts.

Famous Trials, Trial, Sacco, Vanzetti, Anarchist, Anarchism, Death penalty, Electric chair

Abstract:
On the horrific morning of September 11, 2001, when planes crashed into buildings and fell from the sky, Zacarias Moussaoui was sitting in a jail in Minnesota facing immigration charges. Even if he had not been arrested three weeks earlier, when he raised suspicion by paying large sums to a flight training school to learn to pilot a Boeing 747 despite his never having piloted a small plane, it seems unlikely that Moussaoui would have been the twentieth hijacker on one of the four doomed planes. Nonetheless, largely because of the convenient fact that he was alive and in custody, the French citizen of Moroccan descent became the only person tried in an American courtroom for involvement in the 9/11 tragedy. As such, his trial came to be much more than a proceeding to determine whether one would-be terrorist would live or die: it became an opportunity for survivors and relatives of 9/11 victims to seek that elusive closure, and an occasion for evaluating - with the benefit of revealing documents released at the trial - whether thousands of innocent lives could have been saved if bureaucrats only focused more on protecting the country than advancing their careers.

Famous Trials, Trial, Zacarias Moussaoui, Moussaoui, September 11, 9/11, Terrorist, Terrorism, Twin Towers, World Trade Center, Hijacker, Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, Mohammed Atta

Abstract:
It seemed like an open-and-shut case. The video, played on television so often that an executive at CNN called it wallpaper, showed Los Angeles police officers - as their supervisor watched - kicking, stomping on, and beating with metal batons a seemingly defenseless African-American named Rodney King. Polls taken shortly after the incident showed that over 90% of Los Angeles residents who saw the videotape believed that the police used excessive force in arresting King. Despite the videotape, a jury in Simi Valley concluded a year later that the evidence was not sufficient to convict the officers. Within hours of the jury's verdict, Los Angeles erupted in riots. When it was over, fifty-four people had lost their lives, over 7,000 people had been arrested, and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property had been destroyed.

Why did the twelve members of the jury fail to convict any of the officers? Was the jury racist, as some charged? Or did the jury see something in the evidence that justified the brutality witnessed on the Holliday videotape?

The second trial of Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, and Theodore Briseno began on February 25, 1993 in federal court in Los Angeles. Unlike the Simi Valley jury, the federal jury was racially mixed. On April 10, the case was submitted to the jury and, six days later, the jury concluded its work. The jury found two of the officers, Koon and Powell, guilty. They acquitted Officers Wind and Briseno. In October of 1993, Koon and Powell began serving 30-month sentences in separate federal correctional camps. Rodney King, meanwhile, won a $3.8 million verdict from the City of Los Angeles. He used some of the money he received in damages to found a rap record business, Alta-Pazz Recording Company.

Famous Trials, Trial, King, Rodney King, LAPD, Los Angeles Police Department, excessive force, police brutality, Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Can we all just get along?

Abstract:
Two tragedies took place in 1968 in Viet Nam. One was the massacre by United States soldiers of as many as 500 unarmed civilians - old men, women, children - in My Lai on the morning of March 16. The other was the cover-up of that massacre.

On March 14, a small squad from C Company ran into a booby trap, killing a popular sergeant, blinding one GI and wounding several others. The following evening, when a funeral service was held for the killed sergeant, soldiers had revenge on their mind. After the service, Captain Medina rose to give the soldiers a pep talk and discuss the next morning's mission. Medina told them that the VC's crack 48th Battalion was in the vicinity of a hamlet known as My Lai 4, which would be the target of a large-scale assault by the company. The soldiers' mission would be to engage the 48th Battalion and to destroy the village of My Lai. By 7 a.m., Medina said, the women and children would be out of the hamlet and all they could expect to encounter would be the enemy. The soldiers were to explode brick homes, set fire to thatch homes, shoot livestock, poison wells, and destroy the enemy. The seventy-five or so American soldiers would be supported in their assault by gunship pilots.

The cover-up of the My Lai massacre began almost as soon as the killing ended. Official army reports of the operation proclaimed a great victory: 128 enemy dead, only one American casualty (one soldier intentionally shot himself in the foot). The army knew better. Hugh Thompson had filed a complaint, alleging numerous war crimes involving murders of civilians. By late April, General Westmoreland, Army Chief of Staff, had turned the case over to the Inspector General for investigation. Over the next few months, dozens of witnesses were interviewed. It became apparent to all connected with the investigation that war crimes had been committed. In June, 1969, William Calley was flown back from Viet Nam to appear in a line-up for identification by Hugh Thompson. By August, the matter was in the hands of the army's Criminal Investigation Division for a determination as to whether criminal charges should be filed against Calley and other massacre participants. On September 5, formal charges, included six specifications of premeditated murder, were filed against Calley.

Famous Trials, Trial, My Lai, Vietnam, Calley, Medina, Hugh Thompson, Westmoreland, Cover-up, Massacre, Viet Cong, Aubrey Daniel

Abstract:
No criminal case had a more far-reaching effects on modern American politics than the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers spy case which held Americans spellbound in the middle of the twentieth-century. The case catapulted an obscure California congressman named Richard Nixon to national fame, set the stage for Senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious Communist-hunting, and marked the beginning of a conservative intellectual and political movement that would one day put Ronald Reagan in the White House.

Even without its important influence on American political debate, the trials of Alger Hiss for perjury have the makings of a great drama. They featured two men who could hardly be more different, sharing only impressive intelligence. Alger Hiss was a tall, handsome Harvard-trained lawyer with an impeccable pedigree. Whittaker Chambers was a short, stocky, and rumpled Columbia drop-out and confessed former Communist from a poor and troubled Philadelphia family. Time and time again the two men would tell congressional committees, trial juries, and a reading public flatly contradictory stories about Hiss's allegiances during the period from 1933 to 1938. Hiss, according to Chambers, was a dedicated Communist engaged in espionage, even while working at the highest levels of the United States government. Hiss told a very different story, claiming unflinching loyalty and denying even membership in the Communist Party. One man was lying, one was telling the truth.

In the summer of 1948, Chambers's story rang true to one very important young man: Congressman Richard Nixon, a member of the House un-American Activities Committee, then an often-ridiculed political backwater.

Famous Trials, Trial, Hiss, Alger Hiss, Chambers, Whittaker Chambers, Nixon, Richard Nixon, HUAC, House Un-American Activities Committee, Communist, Communism, McCarthy, McCarthyism, Joe McCarthy, Joseph McCarthy

Abstract:
The struggle between the Western Federation of Miners and the Western Mine Owners' Association at the turn of the twentieth century might well be called a war. When the state of Idaho prosecuted William Big Bill Haywood in 1907 for ordering the assassination of former governor Frank Steunenberg, fifteen years of union bombings and murders, fifteen years of mine owner intimidation and greed, and fifteen years of government abuse of process and denials of liberties spilled into the national headlines. Featuring James McParland, America's most famous detective; Harry Orchard, America's most notorious mass murderer turned state's witness; Big Bill Haywood, America's most radical labor leader; and Clarence Darrow, America's most famous defense attorney, the Haywood trial ranks as one of the most fascinating criminal trials in history.

Famous Trials, Trial, Mines, Silver mine, Mine owners, Western Federation of Miners, Western Mine Owners' Association, Union, Workers, Miners, Labor, Haywood, Darrow, Clarence Darrow, Big Bill, Idaho

Abstract:
Called the darkest deed of the nineteenth century, the brutal 1857 murder of 120 men, women, and children at a place in southern Utah called Mountain Meadows remains one of the most controversial events in the history of the American West. Although only one man, John D. Lee, ever faced prosecution (for what probably stands as one of the four largest mass killings of civilians in United States history), many other Mormons ordered, planned, or participated in the massacre of wagon loads of Arkansas emigrants as they headed through southwestern Utah on their way to California. Special controversy surrounds the role in the 1857 events of one man, Brigham Young, the fiery prophet of the Church of Latter-day Saints who led his embattled people to the promised land in the valley of the Great Salt Lake. What exactly Brigham Young knew, and when he knew it, are questions that historians still debate.

Famous Trials, Trial, Mountain Meadow, Utah, John D. Lee, Mormons, Brigham Young, Latter-day Saints, LDS, Salt Lake

Abstract:
The improbable voyage of the schooner Amistad and the court proceedings and diplomatic maneuverings that resulted from that voyage form one of the most significant stories of the nineteenth century. When Steven Spielberg chose the Amistad case as the subject of his 1997 feature film, he finally brought it the attention the case had long deserved, but never received. The Amistad case energized the fledgling abolitionist movement and intensified conflict over slavery, prompted a former President to go before the Supreme Court and condemn the policies of a present Administration, soured diplomatic relations between the United States and Spain for a generation, and created a wave of interest in sending Christian missionaries to Africa.

Famous Trials, Trial, Amistad, Slavery, Slaves, Abolition, Abolitionist, Cinque, John Quincy Adams

Abstract:
In 1895 in Plessy v. Ferguson the Supreme Court announced the legal principle, separate but equal, that would guide American race relations for over half a century. For Charles Houston, the training of black lawyers was a key to mounting an attack on segregation. While at Harvard, Houston wrote that there must be Negro lawyers in every community and that the great majority of these lawyers must come from Negro schools. It was, he concluded, in the best interests of the United States - to provide the best teachers possible at law schools where Negroes might be trained. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Houston attained a teaching position at Howard Law School in 1924, which since its establishment in 1869 had trained three-fourths of the black lawyers in the United States.

In October 1934, Houston recommended to the NAACP board that it concentrate its legal efforts on ending discrimination in education and focus first on segregation in the graduate and professional schools of state universities. The complete absence of graduate and professional opportunities in many states made the inequality dramatic and impossible to dismiss. This essay recounts the efforts of Houston on behalf of Lloyd L. Gaines to gain admission to the then segregated University of Missouri School of Law.

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes announced the Court's decision in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, Registrar of the University of Missouri on December 12, 1938. The Missouri Supreme Court had erred. Missouri had violated the right of Lloyd Gaines to the equal protection of the laws. The equal protection of the laws is a pledge of the protection of equal laws, Hughes declared. The obligation of the State to provide the protection of equal laws must be performed - within its own jurisdiction. The essence of the constitutional right is that it is a personal one. Gaines as an individual was entitled to have Missouri furnish within its borders facilities for legal education substantially equal to those which the State afforded for persons of the white race, whether or not other Negroes sought the same opportunity.

The Gaines case was dismissed when he disappeared and failed to attend depositions on its enforcement. In the years before his death, Charles Houston continued to devote much of his attention to what he saw as the most critical battle of the time, the fight to integrate American schools. World War II had made blacks more militant and many whites more receptive to the idea of integration. By mid-1947, Houston decided the time was right for a direct, open, all-out fight against segregation. There is, Houston declared, no such thing as 'separate but equal.' Segregation itself imports inequality. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka is justly considered a landmark in our history of constitutional jurisprudence. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada is largely forgotten. Gaines deserves better. Of the two cases, only the outcome of Gaines was in genuine doubt. The Court's language in Gaines - the first Supreme Court victory ever achieved by blacks in an education case - required that States prove Negroes had real and substantial equality of educational opportunities. That language, coupled with a shift in attitudes concerning racial issues brought on by World War II, made the Court's verdict in Brown all but inevitable.

Plessy v. Ferguson, Separate but Equal, Segregation, Integration, Education, NAACP, University of Missouri, Gaines, Equal protection, Brown v. Board of Education, Race, Racial attitudes, Race relations

Abstract:
Although it has been over two centuries since the moonlit March night in 1770 when British soldiers killed five Bostonians on King Street, people still debate responsibility for the Boston Massacre. Does the blame rest with the crowd of Bostonians who hurled insults, snowballs, oysters shells, and other objects at the soldiers, or does the blame rest with an overreacting military that violated laws of the colony that prohibited firing at civilians? Whatever side one takes in the debate, all can agree that the Boston Massacre stands as a significant landmark on the road to the American Revolution.

Famous Trials, Trial, Boston, Massacre, Boston Massacre, American Revolution, British, John Adams, Crispus Attucks, Redcoats, Thomas Preston

Abstract:
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Lenny Bruce was the spirit of hipness and rebellion. His underdog, idealistic humor took on every American sacred cow, from capitalism to organized religion to sexual mores. Fans were attracted to Bruce's dark sexiness and brutal honesty. Kenneth Tyson described Bruce as fully, quiveringly conscious.

Bruce's rise to the status of cultural icon began in the mid-1950s in the strip clubs of southern California where Bruce began to develop the iconoclastic edginess that would be his trademark. In his autobiography, "How to Talk Dirty and Influence People", Bruce described the importance of the freedom that came from the burlesque circuit:

Four years working in clubs - that's what really made it for me - every night: doing it, doing it, doing it, getting bored and doing different ways, no pressure on you, and all the other comedians are drunken bums who don't show up, so I could try anything.

On April 9, 1959, Bruce appeared on the nationally-televised Steve Allen Show. Allen introduced Bruce as the most shocking comedian of our time, a young man who is skyrocketing to fame - Lenny Bruce! Two years later, performing before a packed house at Carnegie Hall, Bruce delivered what biographer Albert Goldman called the greatest performance of his career.

In the fall of 1961, however, Bruce's career would begin its downward spiral. Just a week after being arrested in Philadelphia on a narcotics charge, Bruce was charged in San Francisco with violating California obscenity law after a late night performance at the Jazz Workshop. Police found most troubling Bruce's use of the word cocksucker, although his use of the phrase to come (in a sexual sense) also became a major focus of his Jazz Workshop trial. First Amendment lawyer Albert Bendich represented Bruce alone, after the co-counsel he hoped would help turned him down flat saying, You can't win a case based on 'cocksucker.' Win Bendich did, however. In his opening statement Bendich told the jury that Bruce's humor was in the great tradition of social satire, related intimately to the kind of social satire found in the works of such great authors as Aristophanes and Jonathan Swift. Experts from jazz critics to literature professors were called to the stand to offer their opinions on the social importance of Bruce's iconoclastic humor. The jury heard both a tape of Bruce's full performance and Bruce's own testimony on his choice of words before voting to acquit.

Despite the acquittal in San Francisco, the arrests kept coming. In 1962, Bruce was charged again with violating California's obscenity law at a performance at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. Less than two weeks later he faced charges in Chicago following a show at the Gate of Horn. Then he was arrested in Los Angeles for a performance at the Unicorn. While the Troubadour and Unicorn trial ended in a deadlocked jury, Bruce was not so lucky in Illinois, where he was convicted and sentenced to a year in jail. By the summer of 1963, Bruce's troubles were mounting. While free on bond pending appeal of his Chicago conviction, Bruce attempted to do a show in in London, only to be taken to the airport and deported. In June, a California court ordered Bruce confined at the State Rehabilitation Center in Chico for treatment of his drug addiction. By March 1964, following yet another obscenity arrest in southern California, Bruce concluded the last refuge for his controversial brand of humor was New York City.

Famous Trials, Trial, Lenny Bruce, Steve Allen, Jazz Workshop, Obscenity, First Amendment, Free speech, Social satire, Comedy, Comic, Stand-up, Iconoclast, Iconoclastic, Gate of Hom, How to Talk Dirty

Abstract:
The Old West's most famous gunbattle lasted all of about thirty seconds, but it left three men dead, three other men shot, and enough questions to occupy historians for more than a century. The gunfight also led to criminal charges being filed against the three Earp brothers (Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan) and Doc Holliday who, near the O. K. Corral on October 26, 1881, decided to enforce the law against four notorious cowboys. The hearing that followed the shoot-out considered the question of whether the Earps and Hollidays killed out of a justifiable fear for their own lives or simply to rid themselves of troublemakers and personal enemies. After listening to weeks of testimony, Judge Spicer gave his answer - but whether his answer was the right one remained a subject of considerable debate long after the silver mines that gave birth to Tombstone, Arizona had vanished.

Famous Trials, Trial, Earp, Wyatt Earp, Holliday, Doc Holliday, O.K. Corral, Old West, Wild West, Gunfight, Gunbattle, Tombstone

Abstract:
The true story of the 1789 mutiny on the Bounty is far more complicated than suggested by film versions of the event, which have emphasized the gratuitous cruelty of the ship's captain, William Bligh. The psychological drama that played out in the South Seas starring Bligh, the efficient disciplinarian, and his mate, the sensitive and proud Fletcher Christian, led to, among other things: one of the most amazing navigational feats in maritime history, the founding of a British settlement that continues to exist today, and a court-martial in England that answered the question of which of ten captured mutineers should live - and which should die - for their actions.

Famous Trials, Trial, Mutiny, Mutineers, Bounty, Bligh, Fletcher Christian, Court Martial, British Navy, Tahiti, James Cook

Abstract:
The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in Minnesota in 1968 to promote traditional Native American culture and instill pride in the Native American community. AIM's targets included both the federal government, with whom it had a long list of grievances (especially focused on its record of many broken treaties) and progressive Indians, who they believed undermined native traditions and solidarity.

In February 1973, AIM instigated a seventy-one day takeover of the site of a famous 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The massacre had resulted in the deaths - at the hands of the United States Calvary - of several hundred Sioux women and children. In response to the AIM protest, the United States sent troops and tanks. The standoff ended with two deaths and a series of trials of AIM leaders.

In the two years that followed, the Pine Ridge Reservation came under the control of the progressives and elected tribal leader Dick Wilson. Wilson proved to be a vicious and unscrupulous leader, using his power to attack traditionalists. He enforced his will with the aid of a vigilante force called GOONs (Guardians of the Oglala Nation). In the years between 1973 and 1975, called The Reign of Terror by AIM, the Reservation saw over sixty unsolved murders and had the highest murder rate in the United States. More people were killed at Pine Ridge, with a population of about 12,000, than in the rest of the entire state of South Dakota.

In 1975, traditionalists at Pine Ridge asked AIM leaders to send members to the Reservation to protect against further GOON attacks. Among the AIM members to respond to the call was thirty-year-old Leonard Peltier who, at the time, was wanted in Wisconsin on charges of assault and attempted murder of a police officer. AIM established a base of operations at Oglala, the town in the Pine Ridge Reservation with the highest concentration of traditionalist Indians. Hostility toward the federal government and cooperating progressives ran high at Oglala.

Around 11 a.m. on June 26, 1975, FBI agents Jack R. Coler and Ronald A. Williams entered the Jumping Bull compound in Oglala intending to serve an arrest warrant on Jimmy Eagle, a young Indian accused of kidnapping and armed assault, who they believed might be driving a red pick-up truck. The agents began following a red and white van that they believed contained Jimmy Eagle. In fact, the vehicle contained Peltier and two other AIM members. Gunfire erupted and the agents soon found themselves pinned down amidst crossfire and were wounded.

Did Leonard Peltier, at close range with his AR-15, execute two FBI agents who had entered the Pine Ridge Reservation? Peltier's prominent supporters, including author Peter Matthiessen (In the Spirit of Crazy Horse) and Hollywood director and film star Robert Redford (Incident at Oglala), suggested in their accounts suggest that Peltier was the innocent victim of unscrupulous government law enforcement agents and prosecutors. On the other hand, the federal law enforcement community and - most importantly - a federal jury in Fargo believed that Peltier committed first-degree murder on that June day in South Dakota. Peltier's defenders, both inside and outside the American Indian Movement, consider him to be America's foremost political prisoner. To many others, however, Peltier is nothing more than a brutal killer who deserves to spend the rest of his days in a federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. What really happened on June 26, 1975? Did Peltier get a fair trial? Is it time to free Leonard Peltier?

Famous Trials, Trial, American Indian Movement, Native Americans, AIM, Peltier, Leonard Peltier, Wounded Knee, Oglala, Pine Ridge, Reservation, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Incident at Oglala

Abstract:
A sense of having been wronged, together with a warped idea of political duty, brought Charles Julius Guiteau to the Baltimore and Potomac Station in Washington on July 2, 1881. On that same Saturday morning, President James Abram Garfield strode into the station to catch the 9:30 A.M. limited express, which was to take him to the commencement ceremonies of his alma mater, Williams College - and from there, Garfield planned to head off on a much-awaited vacation. He never made the 9:30. Within seconds of entering the station, Garfield was felled by two of Guiteau's bullets, the opening act in what be a drama that included rising and then falling hopes for the President's recovery, the most celebrated insanity trial of the century, and finally civil service reform that backers hoped might discourage future disappointed patronage seekers from taking revengeful actions.

Famous Trials, Trial, Guiteau, Garfield, President Garfield, Insanity, Patronage

Abstract:
Asked about his first sexual experience by an interviewer, Reverend Jerry Falwell said, "I never really expected to make it with Mom, but then after she showed all the other guys in town such a good time, I thought 'What the hell!'" Falwell went on to describe a a Campari-fueled sexual encounter with his mother in an outhouse near Lynchburg, Virginia. Neither the incestuous sex nor the interview ever happened, of course. They sprang from the imagination of a parody writer for Hustler Magazine. When the Campari parody ad appeared in the November 1983 issue of Hustler, the founder of the politically-engaged organization Moral Majority sued, alleging defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The trial and appeals that followed would provide great theater, produce a landmark Supreme Court ruling on the First Amendment, and eventually lead to one of the most unlikely of friendships.

Jerry Falwell, Larry Flynt, Hustler, Pornography, Moral Majority, First Amendment, Free Speech, Offensive speech, Parody

Abstract:
Only once in its history has the United States Supreme Court conducted a criminal trial. The trial, taking place in both Tennessee and the District of Columbia in 1907 and 1908, resulted in the conviction of a sheriff, a deputy sheriff, and four members of a Chattanooga lynch mob. Outraged justices ordered the trial on criminal contempt charges after an almost certainly innocent black man, having been convicted of raping a white woman, was lynched less than a day after word reached Chattanooga that his scheduled execution had been stayed by the U. S. Supreme Court. The trial of Joseph F. Shipp et al. is a story of tragedy and heroism that had been all but forgotten until Mark Curriden, a Dallas reporter, and Leroy Phillips, Jr., a Chattanooga attorney, published their 1999 book, "Contempt of Court: The Turn-of-the-Century Lynching that Launched a Hundred Years of Federalism." Now, with the success of "Contempt of Court" - and a movie based on the book - it appears that the Shipp trial may assume its rightful place as one of the famous trials in American history.

Famous Trials, Trial, Joseph Shipp, Shipp, Contempt of Court, Chattanooga, Lynch mob, Lynching, Lynch, Ed Johnson, Nevada Taylor, McReynold, Federalism

Abstract:
The high-stakes treason trial of Aaron Burr came at an unstable time, both in Europe and in America. The American and French revolutions worried traditional European powers, Great Britain and Spain, who were determined to keep the radical new doctrine from undermining the power of their royalty. Meanwhile, Napoleon's empire-building produced sustained military conflict on the Continent.

The United States seemed on the verge of a war with Spain, even as the Administration struggled to preserve neutrality. Americans west of the Alleghenies rejoiced in President Jefferson's acquisition of the Louisiana Territory, but boundary disputes and Spanish prohibitions on Louisiana residents' entry into Nueva Espana created resentment and threats of reprisal. The Viceroy of Mexico, allied generally with western Indians, sent troops to the Sabine River to protect the Spanish frontier from invasion by United States citizens. Most Westerners saw Spain as tyrannical and viewed Texas and Florida as a rightful part of the United States. Many of these same Westerners expressed a willingness to take Spanish territory by force. Meanwhile, Spain also worried about the designs of residents of its own dominion (especially Mexico), recognizing that the unprivileged masses had grown resentful of Spanish authority.

In this troubled time, the end of President Jefferson's first term, Aaron Burr stepped down from the Vice Presidency, and began preparations for a military expedition that was either - depending upon whose views one solicited - treasonous or patriotic. At its core, however, the Burr Conspiracy clearly was about conquest and adventure.

Famous Trials, Trial, Aaron Burr, Burr, Treason, Conspiracy, Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, Louisiana Territory

Abstract:
No country values free expression more highly than does the United States, and no case in American history stands as a greater landmark on the road to protection for freedom of the press than the trial of a German immigrant printer named John Peter Zenger. On August 5, 1735, twelve New York jurors, inspired by the eloquence of the best lawyer of the period, Andrew Hamilton, ignored the instructions of the Governor's hand-picked judges and returned a verdict of Not Guilty on the charge of publishing seditious libels. The Zenger trial is a remarkable story of a divided Colony, the beginnings of a free press, and the stubborn independence of American jurors.

Famous Trials, Trial, Zenger, John Peter Zenger, John Zenger, Free expression, Freedom of the press, Free press, Sedition, Seditious, Libel, Libelous, Weekly Journal, Jury nullification, Bill of Rights

Abstract:
On the evening of February 4, 1974, three armed members of a group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) burst into the Berkeley, California apartment shared by Patty Hearst and her fiance, Steven Weed. Hearst, the daughter of Randolph Hearst (managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner) and the granddaughter of the legendary William Randolph Hearst, screamed when the men assaulting Weed with a wine bottle. The SLA members carried Hearst, clothed in a nightgown, out of her apartment and forced her into the trunk of a white car. Hearst's abductors fired a round of bullets as they sped away, followed by a second vehicle.

On April 15, the security camera of the Sunset District branch of Hibernia Bank in San Francisco showed Patricia Hearst holding an assault rifle as members of the Symbionese Liberation Army carried out the midday robbery. Was the rich heiress, kidnapped two months earlier, acting in fear of her life? Was she brainwashed? Or did she participate in the robbery as a loyal soldier in the revolution? That was the issue a California jury had to decide in the 1976 trial of Patty Hearst.

Famous Trials, Trial, Hearst, Patty Hearst, Tania, Symbionese Liberation Army, SLA, Randolph Hearst, Stockholm Syndrome, POW Survivor Syndrome

Abstract:
All other civil rights groups in 1964 considered Mississippi - the most impenetrable state in the union - hopeless. The decision of Bob Moses of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to shake up the Magnolia State by sending six hundred young volunteers into every corner of the state to register new black voters brimmed with danger. Moses explained to a first gathering of student volunteers, When you're not in Mississippi, it's not real. And when you're there, the rest of the world isn't real. In the early morning hours of June 20, Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney boarded their blue CORE station wagon and left the rolling hills of southwestern Ohio, bound for Meridian. This article recounts the career of John Doar of the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and his role in prosecuting the Mississippi Burning Trial in 1967. Looking back nearly more than thirty years later, Doar believed that the trial helped Mississippi get beyond the caste system. Up to that time, no white person in the state had ever been convicted for violence against a black. After the trial, the good people of Mississippi became more confident that they could move away from their past.

Mississippi, Meridian, Philadelphia, Civil rights, Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman, John Doar, Mississippi Burning, KKK, Ku Klux Klan, White Knights, Conspiracy, Murder, Selma, Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., J. Edgar Hoover, FBI, Justice Department, Freedom Marchers

Abstract:
Detroit seemed to Dr. Ossian Sweet a good place to launch a medical practice in 1921. Ossian Sweet understood racial violence all too well. Growing up in Orlando, Ossian had witnessed a large crowd of whites running a black boy down a dusty road. Seeing racial hatred in its ugliest forms instilled in Sweet a deep race consciousness and determination not to let bigotry prevent him from achieving his own personal goals. He decided to move into his new home at 2905 Garland, whatever the risks to him and his family.

Clarence Darrow associated with many causes over his long career, but the most constant of all was that of black Americans. From his early identification with the sacred cause of abolition to his charitable support of the NAACP, Darrow always stood out as one of the Negro's best white friends.

On the evening of September 9, with the occupants of the Sweet house huddled together a crowd gathered, then increased, stones came through the window and shots came from the house and two members of the crowd lay on the ground wounded, one mortally. After presenting his seventy witnesses, the Prosecutor would tell the jury that the case was simple: Leon Breiner, peacefully chatting with his neighbor at his doorstep enjoying his God-given and inalienable right to live, is shot through the back from ambush. You can't make anything out of these facts but cold-blooded murder.... Darrow wanted the Sweet trial to be about more than the events of one night in Detroit. He wanted the trial to be about a history of black suffering in America. Clarence Darrow wanted the jury to understand the fear felt inside 2905 Garland on the night of September 9. Through a series of defense witnesses, Darrow presented a very different version of the scene.

This essay details the trial that resulted first in a hung jury and mistrial. After the second trial resulted in a verdict of not guilty Darrow told the press, "The verdict meant simply that the doctrine that a man's house is his castle applied to the black man as well as the white man. If not the first time that a white jury had vindicated this principle, it was the first time that ever came to my notice."

Ossian Sweet, Henry Sweet, Darrow, Clarence Darrow, Trials, Murder, Integration, Segregation, NAACP, Race riot, Riot, Racial violence, Detroit, Frank Murphy, Abolition, Self-defense, Negro, African-American, Discrimination

Abstract:
The arrest, trial, and execution of John Brown in the fall of 1859 came at a critical moment in United State history. According to historian David S. Reynolds in his biography, "John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights" (2005), Brown's actions and statements following his failed attempt to begin a slave insurrection near Harper's Ferry, Virginia so polarized northern and southern opinion on the slavery issue as to ensure Abraham Lincoln's election and cause the Civil War to occur perhaps two decades earlier than it might have otherwise. Reynolds is quick to point out that not only was Brown right on slavery and other racial issues of his day, but that his conduct - in causing the Civil War to begin in 1861 rather than, say, 1881 - potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives that could have been lost in a war fought in a time of much greater population and more deadly weaponry and, at the same time, might well have spared an entire generation of African-Americans the humiliating experience of human bondage.

Famous Trials, Trial, John Brown, Harpers Ferry, Civil War, Slavery, Slaves, Abolitionist, Abolitionism, Pottawatomie

Abstract:
Andrew Johnson was a lifelong Democrat and slave owner who won a place alongside Abraham Lincoln on the 1864 Republican ticket in order to gain the support of pro-war Democrats. Johnson was fiercely pro-Union and had come to national prominence when, as a Senator from the important border state of Tennessee, he denounced secession as treason. In May, 1868, the Senate came within a single vote of taking the unprecedented step of removing a president from office. Although the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson was ostensibly about a violation of the Tenure of Office Act, it was about much more than that. Also on trial in 1868 were Johnson's lenient policies towards Reconstruction and his vetoes of the Freedmen's Bureau Act and the Civil Rights Act. The trial was, above all else, a political trial.

Famous Trials, Trial, Andrew Johnson, President Johnson, Tenure of Office Act, Impeachment, Freedmen's Bureau

Abstract:
More than any other woman of her generation, Susan B. Anthony saw that all of the legal disabilities faced by American women owed their existence to the simple fact that women lacked the vote. When Anthony, at age 32, attended her first woman's rights convention in Syracuse in 1852, she declared that the right which woman needed above every other, the one indeed which would secure to her all the others, was the right of suffrage. Anthony spent the next fifty-plus years of her life fighting for the right to vote. She would work tirelessly: giving speeches, petitioning Congress and state legislatures, publishing a feminist newspaper - all for a cause that would not succeed until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment fourteen years after her death in 1906.

She would, however, once have the satisfaction of seeing her completed ballot drop through the opening of a ballot box. It happened in Rochester, New York on November 5, 1872, and the event - and the trial for illegal voting that followed - would create a opportunity for Anthony to spread her arguments for women suffrage to a wider audience than ever before.

Famous Trials, Trial, Susan B. Anthony, Women, Suffrage, Suffragette, Women's Rights, Feminism, Feminist, Vote, Right to Vote, Nineteenth Amendment

Abstract:
One evening, Circuit Judge James Horton, Jr. was having dinner with his family in his antebellum home in central Athens, Alabama; Limestone's county seat. Dinners in the Horton household were an opportunity to discuss events of the day. In early March of 1933, there were plenty of events to discuss. The ringing of their party line phone interrupted the Horton family dinner. The judge excused himself from the table. When he returned a few minutes later, he looked grim. The retrial of the Scottsboro Boys had been transferred to Decatur in neighboring Morgan County. He was to be the presiding judge. Sensational accounts of the alleged rape had run in local papers. Rapid-fire trials, beginning just twelve days after the arrests, gave locals little reason to think their initial view concerning the defendants' guilt was wrong. Few bothered to speculate if the evidence might have looked different had the defendants been given better representation than the half-hearted defense provided by their attorneys.

The announcement that Judge James Horton would preside at the retrial of the Scottsboro Boys was received favorably. The Limestone Democrat, Horton's hometown, praised his unusually equable nature, great legal ability and fairness. Horton would give the foreign defense no reason to complain, wrote the paper's editor. The lead prosecutor, Alabama Attorney General Thomas Knight, also expressed pleasure with the choice, telling the press that Horton would make an excellent judge. There was little in Judge Horton's background to give Knight cause for concern. As a state representative and senator for ten years, Horton had devoted himself to election reform and road construction, not contentious social issues. One observer noted, Horton was not very notably social-minded, and was liberal only in the sense of putting the rules of the game above the desire to win. He held many of the beliefs one would expect of a large landowner, politician, and planter in a small town in rural South. He accepted, as did the vast majority of white Alabamans in 1933, the rightness of segregation.

Horton approached the upcoming retrial of the Scottsboro Boys with the resolve - despite his belief that the defendants were most likely guilty - to do everything he could to present a trial that would do the South proud. Despite the knowledge that setting aside the Patterson verdict would likely mean an end to his judicial career, the decision for Horton was not a difficult one. A judge must do his duty. My mother early taught me a phrase she said was her father's motto, Horton later recalled. It has frequently come to mind in difficult situations. The phrase Horton learned on his mother's knee was Justitia fiat coelum ruat - Let justice be done though the Heavens may fall.

Shortly after Horton's death, county officials installed a plaque on the south wall of the second-floor Limestone County courtroom in which he read his opinion setting aside the jury's verdict in the Patterson trial. In raised bronze on the plaque are inscribed words from the judge's instructions to the jury: So far as the law is concerned it knows neither native nor alien, Jew nor Gentile, black nor white. This case is no different from any other. We have only to do our duty without fear or favor.

Famous Trials, Trials, Scottsboro, Scottsboro Boys, Judge Horton, James Horton

Abstract:
Although the 1995 criminal trial of O. J. Simpson for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman has been called a great trash novel come to life, no one can deny the pull it had on the American public. If the early reports of the murder of the wife of the ex-football-star-turned-sports-announcer hadn't caught people's full attention, Simpson's surreal Bronco ride on the day of his arrest certainly did - ninety-five million television viewers witnessed the slow police chase live. The 133 days of televised courtroom testimony turned countless viewers into Simpson trial junkies. Even foreign leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Boris Yeltsin eagerly gossiped about the trial. When Yeltsin stepped off his plane to meet President Clinton, the first question he asked was, Do you think O. J. did it? When, at 10 a.m. PST on October 3, Judge Ito's clerk read the jury's verdict of Not Guilty, 91% of all persons viewing television were glued to the unfolding scene in the Los Angeles courtroom.

Famous Trials, Trial, OJ, O. J. Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson, Ronald Goldman, Judge Ito, Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Shapiro, Marcia Clark, Mark Fuhrman, Kato Kaelin, Dream Team, If it doesn't fit you must acquit

Abstract:
The automobile and manufacturing boom that began in Detroit about 1915 made the city a magnet for blacks fleeing the economic stagnation of the South. In the decade from 1915 to 1925, Detroit's black population grew more than tenfold, from 7,000 to 82,000. A severe housing shortage developed, as the city's compact black district could not accommodate all the new arrivals. Blacks brave enough to purchase or rent homes in previously all-white neighborhoods faced intimidation and violence. The spring and summer of 1925 saw several ugly housing-related incidents. It was in this violent summer of 1925 that a black doctor named Ossian Sweet purchased a home at 2905 Garland, in an all-white middle-class neighborhood. Although Sweet originally planned to move his family into the new home in July, he postponed the move for two months in the hopes that racial tensions might ease. They didn't.

Dr. Sweet decided to move his family into his Garland Avenue home on September 8. Ossian Sweet explained his decision to his brother: I have to die like a man or live a coward. Before moving in, Sweet prepared himself for the mob he expected to face. He bought nine guns and enough ammunition for all of them. He notified Detroit police of his planned move and asked for protection. He left his infant daughter at his wife's mother's home. Finally, he arranged to have his younger brothers, Henry and Otis, as well as some of their friends, join him and his wife Gladys for their first perilous night on Garland Avenue.

The next evening was hot. As Gladys Sweet worked in the kitchen preparing a meal, Ossian Sweet and his acquaintances played cards. Someone in the house exclaimed, My God, look at the people! The Sweets looked out through their windows and a screen door to see a swelling crowd. According to the Sweets, stones began flying. The Sweets pulled down the blinds and waited. Rocks hit the house. One smashed through an upstairs window. At 8:25, a fusillade of shots rang out from the upper floor and back porch of the Sweet home. One of the bullets struck thirty-three-year-old Leon Breiner in the back as he stood on the porch of 2914 Garland, talking to friends. Breiner's last words were, Boys, they've shot me. Police covered Breiner with a blanket and took him away. Nearby, another man, Eric Houghberg, lay with a bullet wound to the leg.

Six policeman (who had been present at the house at the time of the shooting) entered the Sweet home, flung up all the shades, turned on all the lights, and arrested the eleven occupants. At police headquarters, the Sweets and their house guests were told for the first time that a man had been killed and a boy wounded. Each of the arrested persons was interviewed separately. They gave wildly different accounts of events. Ossian Sweet admitted having distributed a gun to each male occupant, while some of those interviewed denied any knowledge of guns. At about 3:30 A.M., an assistant prosecutor informed them that he planned to recommend first degree murder warrants against all eleven.

Famous Trials, Trial, Ossian Sweet, Detroit, Race, Race riot, Segregation, Housing, All white neighborhood, NAACP, Arthur Garfield Hays, Clarence Darrow, Frank Murphy, Judge Murphy, Henry Sweet

Abstract:
The records of the trial of Gaius (sometimes spelled Caius) Verres reveal - far better than any other extant source - the corruption of the last years of the Roman Republic. Through a series of orations and witnesses, Verres's prosecutor, Cicero, presented a powerful story of how the shocking greed and arrogance of a provincial governor wreaked havoc on what had been the breadbasket of the Roman Empire, Sicily. In his successful prosecution of Verres, Cicero both demonstrated the talents that would make him one of Rome's foremost politicians and set in motion events that bring an end to the senatorial oligarchy established by the Sullan constitution.

A word of caution: what we know about Gaius Verres comes to us from Cicero's seven trial orations. No records of the speeches by Verres's defense attorney survive. Nor do we have from Verres himself any explanation for his behavior. There is the possibility, of course, that Cicero, as prosecutor, might have exaggerated the extent of Verres's abuses, or that he might have omitted information that could have put Verres's actions in a more sympathetic light. The mountains of evidence presented by Cicero leave little doubt, however, that Verres was indeed a very despised and unscrupulous official. If he wasn't the worst governor that a Roman province was ever made to suffer, he surely ranks right up there.

Rome, Roman Empire, Roman Senate, Roman Republic, Roman Governor, Cicero, graft, corruption, Sicily

Abstract:
Abolitionism came relatively late to Lewis Tappan. Devotional, benevolent and hardworking are all words that describe Tappan in his twenties and thirties. Social reformer he was not. In 1818, Tappan abandoned the Calvinism of his mother for Unitarianism, then fashionable for a socially ambitious merchant. For the next eight years, Tappan enjoyed the typical life of an upper-middle-class New England merchant. He took his new faith seriously, however, editing a Unitarian journal, and becoming the first treasurer of the American Unitarian Association. In the mid-1820's, America experienced The Great Second Awakening, a widespread revival of religion and religious debate and Tappan became a zealous Christian. Around 1830, at the age of forty-one, Tappan began to take an interest in the slavery question. In the summer of 1833, Tappan resolved to do whatever he could for the abolitionist cause. It turned out to be a lot.

In 1839 when word of the arrest of the Amistad Africans reached Lewis Tappan in New York, he called a meeting of the city's leading abolitionists. Tappan recognized that the Amistad story could be used to bring to the attention of the public the plight of the hundreds of thousands American slaves. Not content to merely collect donations, Tappan set off for New Haven. He met the Africans for the first time at the city jail.

The usually quiet town of Hartford took on a carnival atmosphere as the time of trial approached. The great excitement surrounding the case pleased Tappan and his fellow abolitionists. Lewis Tappan published his account of the complicated legal maneuverings which, not surprisingly, reflected his abolitionist bias. As much as he might have wished it would be so, Tappan could not have expected any federal district judge to issue a decision repudiating the institution of slavery. In October 1840, Lewis Tappan visited John Quincy Adams at his home in Massachusetts. Tappan asked Old Man Eloquent to join Roger Baldwin in arguing the Africans' case in Washington. The former President at first resisted. But Adams believed firmly in the rightness of the cause. He finally agreed to join Baldwin in arguments before the Court. By the blessing of God, I will argue the case before the Supreme Court, Adams told Tappan. On March 9, 1841, the Supreme Court announced its decision that the Negroes were kidnapped Africans, who by the laws of Spain itself were entitled to their freedom.

Lewis Tappan sat in the audience at Cooper Hall in January 1863 as Negro minister Henry Garnat opened the Emancipation Jubilee with a reading of Lincoln's Proclamation freeing the slaves. When the reading finished, Tappan joined the crowd in giving three cheers for the President. The abolitionist movement had come along way since the Amistad turned up along Long Island's coast and Tappan as much as anyone was responsible for its progress.

Famous Trials, Trials, Amistad, Slavery, Slaves, Abolition, Abolitionist, Cinque, Lewis Tappan, Emancipation, John Quincy Adams, Africans, Negroes

Abstract:
Moviemakers believe that history can be made more dramatic. They add and subtract characters, invent dialogue and scenes, make heroes more heroic, make villains more villainous, correct incorrectness, make ends happier, and turn shades of gray into black or white. They even tell lies-all in the interest of providing a good show, of course. Steven Spielberg, producer-director of the 1997 historical drama "Amistad," is no exception.

Whether Hollywood's reshaping of history is good or bad depends upon whether one believes it is more important to be thoroughly entertained or to have a clear sense of history. Right now, on this side of the Millennium, few people seem worked up about the fictionalizing of history.

The Journal of Maritime Law and Commerce is probably not the first source that most viewers of "Amistad" will consult to see if they got their history straight from Spielberg, but it is the aim of this article to make it a good choice for those who do. As the title of this journal suggests-and as its editor insists-special attention will be given in this article to the role admiralty law played in the improbable drama that began in 1839.

Amistad, Slaves, Slavery, Admiralty Law, Maritime Law