Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 31 - 45 of 45
Full-Text Articles in Legal History
The Trial Of The Lincoln Assassination Conspirators, Douglas O. Linder
The Trial Of The Lincoln Assassination Conspirators, Douglas O. Linder
Faculty Works
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 Trial Of Zacarias Moussaoui, Douglas O. Linder
The Trial Of Zacarias Moussaoui, Douglas O. Linder
Faculty Works
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
Faculty Works
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
Faculty Works
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 …
The Boston Massacre Trials: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
The Boston Massacre Trials: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
Faculty Works
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.
The Charles Manson (Tate-Labianca Murder) Trial, Douglas O. Linder
The Charles Manson (Tate-Labianca Murder) Trial, Douglas O. Linder
Faculty Works
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 …
The Dr. Sam Sheppard Trial, Douglas O. Linder
The Dr. Sam Sheppard Trial, Douglas O. Linder
Faculty Works
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 Haymarket Riot And Subsequent Trial: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
The Haymarket Riot And Subsequent Trial: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
Faculty Works
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 …
The Oklahoma City Bombing And The Trial Of Timothy Mcveigh, Douglas O. Linder
The Oklahoma City Bombing And The Trial Of Timothy Mcveigh, Douglas O. Linder
Faculty Works
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 …
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
Faculty Works
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 Trial Of John W. Hinckley, Jr., Douglas O. Linder
The Trial Of John W. Hinckley, Jr., Douglas O. Linder
Faculty Works
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 …
The Trial Of Sacco And Vanzetti, Douglas O. Linder
The Trial Of Sacco And Vanzetti, Douglas O. Linder
Faculty Works
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 …
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
Faculty Works
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 Trials Of Alger Hiss: A Commentary, Douglas O. Linder
The Trials Of Alger Hiss: A Commentary, Douglas O. Linder
Faculty Works
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 Trials Of Los Angeles Police Officers' In Connection With The Beating Of Rodney King, Douglas O. Linder
The Trials Of Los Angeles Police Officers' In Connection With The Beating Of Rodney King, Douglas O. Linder
Faculty Works
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 …