Alex McBride on Trial By Jury (with Video)

This is a fun book and everyone should get it. It’s about two of the most shyster lawyers you can imagine in New York in the second half of the 19th century. In those days you didn’t need a degree or anything to be a lawyer. Howe was an English guy on the run for murder and he pitched up in New York and started a law firm on Center Street in downtown Manhattan. He fell in with the much smarter but equally impecunious Hummel, a ratbag from the Lower East Side. Hummel was a brilliant lawyer but Howe was a brilliant trial advocate and Howe did over 600 capital cases and hardly ever lost. He never lost because of underhand practices like bribing judges and jurors. He also designed his own clothes and he would change his outfits as the trial grew closer to the verdict.

 

What did he wear for the verdict?

 

All black apart from a diamond pin in his cravat.

 

Brilliant.

 

Brilliant indeed. If you’d killed someone you definitely needed him. He would also dress his clients. He once defended a seaman who had killed three captains one after the other. The prosecution showed up with these captains’ families, their wives and children, and Howe thinks: ‘Shit! What am I going to do?’ He sees his own wife and daughter in the courtroom watching his performance and he gets them to play the wife and child of the seaman who, of course, gets off. So they had a whole casting agency and would hire wives of fragile beauty suckling infants. He always dressed his clients as paupers even though they were paying him tens of thousands of dollars. He was a terrible sadist too and he once engineered for a guy to swing just because he could.

 

Was Hummel nicer?

 

Nicer isn’t the word I’d be looking for. Hummel’s favourite wheeze was sending showgirls round to chat up wealthy engaged or married young men and then blackmailing them and splitting the profit with the showgirl. There is a bit of Howe and Hummel in every lawyer.

 

This is a jolly good read and informative about how trials fit together in history and there is a good bit about how the English trial by jury came about. At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 Pope Innocent III decided you couldn’t ask God to decide on earthly affairs and so the old trial by ordeal was no longer acceptable. They used to put a red hot poker in your hand and then bind it up and if it healed nicely then you were in the clear but if it festered then you were guilty. Of course, if the evidence was weak they might cool the poker off a bit first. But now the authorities had a problem. How would they continue…

 

To execute people?

But that was just continental Europe. We didn’t do that because it seemed unfair, so we used something that had already been around for hundreds of years. The jury. Until then they had just vouched for things by oath, partly deciding whether there was a case to answer. So, until 1933 you had the Grand Jury which decided if there was a case to answer and the Petty Jury which would decide on guilt or innocence. So, the first trial by jury was in 1219. (There was no concept of innocent until proven guilty until William Garrow’s ‘presumption of innocence’ in the late 18th century.)

 

Trials in those days were blisteringly quick and the prosecutor was usually the victim, unless it was a murder case, of course, in which case the victim would be dead. So you’d be hauled in front of your accuser, face to face, and there were no lawyers so you’d say: No! No! It wasn’t me! Judges were doing 20 trials a day.

 

How quickly were people executed?

 

Well, this is all in my book, but by the 17th century execution days were hugely popular. They’d wait until they’d rounded up enough people and then there would be a bank holiday. The condemned were kept in Newgate and at 7am they’d be taken up to Tyburn (Marble Arch) and the crowds would line the route. The condemned would sit astride their coffins, even children…

 

They executed children?

 

Oh yes. And everyone would dress up. A shroud if they were guilty, a feather if they were innocent. The women wore silk and handed out oranges. They stopped at all the pubs and people gave them parting cups.

 

So at least you’d be drunk by the time you got to the gallows?

 

Slaughtered, yes. And to watch the execution you could buy Mother Proctor’s pews, priced according to the fame of the person being put to death. Earl Ferrers went to execution in his own carriage in the 1760s and wore his wedding suit, saying that his wedding day and his execution day were the unhappiest of his life. People fought for the best position and when the person was dangling twitching on the rope, his or her family would rush forward and tug at them to quicken their journey to the next world.