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Articles 1 - 30 of 45
Full-Text Articles in Law
The Earp-Holliday Trial: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
The Earp-Holliday Trial: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Trial Of Charles Guiteau: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
The Trial Of Charles Guiteau: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Trial Of John Brown: A Commentary, Douglas O. Linder
The Trial Of John Brown: A Commentary, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Mcmartin Preschool Abuse Trial, Douglas O. Linder
The Mcmartin Preschool Abuse Trial, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Amistad Case, Douglas O. Linder
The Amistad Case, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Leonard Peltier Trial, Douglas O. Linder
The Leonard Peltier Trial, Douglas O. Linder
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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 - …
The Trial Of Susan B. Anthony For Illegal Voting, Douglas O. Linder
The Trial Of Susan B. Anthony For Illegal Voting, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Chicago Eight Conspiracy Trial, Douglas O. Linder
The Chicago Eight Conspiracy Trial, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Impeachment Trial Of Andrew Johnson, Douglas O. Linder
The Impeachment Trial Of Andrew Johnson, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Leopold And Loeb Trial: A Brief Account, Douglas O. Linder
The Leopold And Loeb Trial: A Brief Account, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Mississippi Burning Trial (U. S. Vs. Price Et Al.), Douglas O. Linder
The Mississippi Burning Trial (U. S. Vs. Price Et Al.), Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Sweet Trials: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
The Sweet Trials: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Witchcraft Trials In Salem: A Commentary, Douglas O. Linder
The Witchcraft Trials In Salem: A Commentary, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Trial Of Louis Riel, Douglas O. Linder
The Trial Of Louis Riel, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Trials Of The Scottsboro Boys, Douglas O. Linder
The Trials Of The Scottsboro Boys, Douglas O. Linder
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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.
Patty Hearst Trial (1976), Douglas O. Linder
Patty Hearst Trial (1976), Douglas O. Linder
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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 fiancé, 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 …
State V. John Scopes (The Monkey Trial), Douglas O. Linder
State V. John Scopes (The Monkey Trial), Douglas O. Linder
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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? …
The Dakota Conflict Trials, Douglas O. Linder
The Dakota Conflict Trials, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Trial Of William 'Big Bill' Haywood, Douglas O. Linder
The Trial Of William 'Big Bill' Haywood, Douglas O. Linder
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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, …
The Trials Of Lenny Bruce, Douglas O. Linder
The Trials Of Lenny Bruce, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Mountain Meadows Massacre Of 1857 And The Trials Of John D. Lee: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
The Mountain Meadows Massacre Of 1857 And The Trials Of John D. Lee: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
The Trials Of Oscar Wilde: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
The Trials Of Oscar Wilde: An Account, Douglas O. Linder
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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?
The Impeachment Trial Of President William Clinton, Douglas O. Linder
The Impeachment Trial Of President William Clinton, Douglas O. Linder
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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 …
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 …
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 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 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 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 …