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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
The Black Sox Trial: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
The Black Sox Trial: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Dr. Sam Sheppard Trial, Douglas O. Linder
The Dr. Sam Sheppard Trial, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Massie (Honor Killing) Trials 1931-32, Douglas O. Linder
The Massie (Honor Killing) Trials 1931-32, Douglas O. Linder
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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.
The Nuremberg Trials, Douglas O. Linder
The Nuremberg Trials, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Story Of The Court-Martial Of The Bounty Mutineers, Douglas O. Linder
The Story Of The Court-Martial Of The Bounty Mutineers, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Treason Trial Of Aaron Burr, Douglas O. Linder
The Treason Trial Of Aaron Burr, Douglas O. Linder
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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' …
The Trial Of Lindy And Michael Chamberlain ('The Dingo Trial'), Douglas O. Linder
The Trial Of Lindy And Michael Chamberlain ('The Dingo Trial'), Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Trial Of Lizzie Borden, Douglas O. Linder
The Trial Of Lizzie Borden, Douglas O. Linder
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"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 …
The Trial Of Richard Bruno Hauptmann, Douglas O. Linder
The Trial Of Richard Bruno Hauptmann, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Trial Of The Lincoln Assassination Conspirators, Douglas O. Linder
The Trial Of The Lincoln Assassination Conspirators, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Trials Of Alger Hiss: A Commentary, Douglas O. Linder
The Trials Of Alger Hiss: A Commentary, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Trial Of Zacarias Moussaoui, Douglas O. Linder
The Trial Of Zacarias Moussaoui, Douglas O. Linder
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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 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Trial, Douglas O. Linder
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Trial, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
Trial Of The Rosenbergs: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
Trial Of The Rosenbergs: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
An Introduction To The My Lai Courts-Martial, Douglas O. Linder
An Introduction To The My Lai Courts-Martial, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …