Order in the Court: 10 “Trials of the Century”

Reviled by those he sought to serve, Socrates was tried as a threat to Athenian democracy in 399 BCE, formally on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. He was ultimately condemned to death by poisoning (the poison probably being hemlock). As depicted in Plato‘s Apology, Socrates’ trial and death raise vital questions about the nature of democracy, the value of free speech, and the potential conflict between moral and religious obligation and the laws of the state.

As one of the most prominent proponents of the Copernican model of the solar system, Galileo faced trial at the hands of the Inquisition in 1633. During his first appearance before the Inquisition, he was confronted with an edict recording that he was forbidden to discuss the Copernican theory. In his defense Galileo produced a letter from Cardinal Bellarmine, by then dead, stating that he was admonished only not to hold or defend the theory. In what can only be called a plea bargain, Galileo confessed to having overstated his case. He was pronounced to be vehemently suspect of heresy and was condemned to life imprisonment and was made to abjure formally. In 1992 the Catholic Church finally admitted its error at the Inquisition, and in 2000 Pope John Paul II gave a formal apology for the trial of Galileo and other sins of the church.

Between May and October 1692, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony town of Salem was overrun with hysteria over suspected witches. Stimulated by voodoo tales told by a West Indian slave, Tituba, a few young girls claimed they were possessed by the devil and subsequently accused three Salem women, including Tituba, of witchcraft. As Tituba and other accused persons were pressured and consequently incriminated others in false confessions, public hysteria over the threat of witchcraft mounted throughout Massachusetts. Nineteen “witches” were eventually convicted and sentenced to hanging, while many others were imprisoned. By September 1692 the climate of mass hysteria had begun to abate, and public opinion first stopped, and then condemned, the trials. The governor dissolved the special court in October and released the remaining prisoners, while the Massachusetts General Court (legislature) later annulled the witch trials’ convictions and granted indemnities to the families of those who had been executed.

More than a century after her acquittal on charges of brutally axe murdering her parents, Lizzie Borden remained in the popular consciousness thanks to the nursery rhyme “Lizzie Borden took an axe; And gave her mother forty whacks; And when she saw what she had done; She gave her father forty-one.” So, what happened? On August 4, 1892, Lizzie’s father left home to conduct his business, leaving in the house, besides his wife, an Irish maid (Bridget Sullivan) and Lizzie. On his return, he settled on a couch for a nap. About 11:15 am, Lizzie (according to her testimony) discovered her father dead, repeatedly struck in the head with a sharp instrument. Upstairs his wife’s body was found, even more brutally mutilated; examination proved that her death had preceded her husband’s by an hour or so. It was found that Lizzie had tried to purchase prussic acid (a poison) on August 3, and a few days later she was alleged to have burned a dress in a stove. Still, in June 1893 a jury acquitted her, given that there was only circumstantial and no hard evidence against Lizzie.

One of the darkest hours in baseball history occurred in 1921, when eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox were indicted on charges of having thrown that year’s World Series, in what was dubbed the Black Sox Scandal. The accused players were pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Claude (“Lefty”) Williams, first baseman Arnold (“Chick”) Gandil, shortstop Charles (“Swede”) Risberg, third baseman George (“Buck”) Weaver, outfielders Joe (“Shoeless Joe”) Jackson and Oscar (“Happy”) Felsch, and utility infielder Fred McMullin. Court records suggest that the eight players received $70,000 to $100,000 for losing five games to three. In spite of their eventual acquittal, the accused players were banned from baseball, and Shoeless Joe Jackson‘s role in the scandal was immortalized in the phrase “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

The 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial” pitted two of the most skilled orators of the era, William Jennings Bryan (for the prosecution) and Clarence Darrow (for the defense), against each other in a debate over the teaching of Charles Darwin‘s theory of evolution. In March 1925 the Tennessee legislature had declared unlawful the teaching of any doctrine denying the divine creation of man as taught by the Bible. World attention focused on the trial proceedings, which promised confrontation between fundamentalist literal belief and liberal interpretation of the Scriptures. The judge ruled out any test of the law’s constitutionality or argument on the validity of the theory, limiting the trial to the single question of whether John T. Scopes had taught evolution, which he admittedly had. He was convicted and fined $100. On appeal, the state Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the 1925 law but acquitted Scopes on the technicality that he had been fined excessively. The law was repealed in 1967.

This case involved the controversial murder trial in Massachusetts that extended over seven years (1920–27) and resulted in the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The trial resulted from the murders in South Braintree, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1920, of F.A. Parmenter, paymaster of a shoe factory, and Alessandro Berardelli, the guard accompanying him, in order to secure the payroll that they were carrying. On May 5 Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists who had immigrated to the United States in 1908, were arrested for the crime. On May 31, 1921, they were brought to trial and on July 14 both were found guilty. Socialists and radicals protested the men’s innocence. All attempts for retrial on the ground of false identification failed. On November 18, 1925, Celestino Madeiros, then under a sentence for murder, confessed that he had participated in the crime with the Joe Morelli gang. The state Supreme Court refused to upset the verdict, because at that time the trial judge had the final power to reopen on the ground of additional evidence. The two men were sentenced to death on April 9, 1927. A storm of protest arose across the United States, and the governor of Massachusetts appointed an independent committee to investigate. Still, on August 3, 1927, the governor refused to exercise his power of clemency; his advisory committee agreed with this stand. Demonstrations proceeded in many cities throughout the world, and bombs were set off in New York City and Philadelphia. Sacco and Vanzetti, still maintaining their innocence, were executed on August 23, 1927.

Charles Manson spent much of his youth in juvenile reformatories in West Virginia before heading out to California in 1967. There, by 1968, he had become the leader of the “Family,” a communal religious cult dedicated to studying and implementing his eccentric religious teachings, which were drawn from science fiction as well as the occult and fringe psychology. He preached the coming of an apocalyptic race war that would devastate the United States and leave the Family in a position of dominant power. Manson’s hold over his followers was graphically illustrated in 1968–69, when the Family carried out several murders on Manson’s orders. The most famous victim was actress Sharon Tate, wife of motion-picture director Roman Polanski, who was killed in her Los Angeles home along with three guests. The ensuing trial of Manson and his followers in 1970 attracted national attention. In 1971 Manson was sentenced to death, but, following the abolition of capital punishment in California in 1972, his sentence was commuted to life in prison.

O.J. Simpson was a Hall of Fame football star and actor (and famed rental car pitchman for Hertz) who would forever be associated with a brutal double murder, a low-speed freeway chase in a Ford Bronco watched live by millions on television, and a brilliant trial defense by an all-star team that included Alan Dershowitz and Johnnie Cochran. On June 12, 1994, Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death outside her home in Los Angeles. After that “chase” and thoughts that Simpson might commit suicide, he was arrested and charged with the two murders, pleading not guilty. Simpson’s eventual acquittal on October 3, 1995—despite what seemed to many to be overwhelming physical evidence—owed much to Cochran’s summation of the state’s evidence: “If it [a bloody glove found at the crime scene] doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” That wasn’t the end for Simpson. In a separate civil trial decision in 1997, he was found liable for the deaths and was ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages to the families. Simpson later collaborated on the book If I Did It, in which he hypothesized about how he would have committed the murders. Public outrage prevented its initial publication in 2006, but a bankruptcy court subsequently awarded the book’s rights to the Goldman family, who released the work in 2007.

What initially began as a probe into Arkansas real estate dealings turned into a five-year investigation headed by independent counsel Kenneth Starr that ultimately focused on President Bill Clinton‘s relationship with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. Clinton denied the charges under oath and emphatically in a press conference (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”), but evidence emerged that the president had lied. When Starr issued his final 445-page report, it referred only twice to the Whitewater land deal, the original target of the investigation, whereas it referred to the issue of sex more than 500 times. On December 19, 1998, the House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment, for perjury and obstruction of justice—only the second time a president had been impeached. The Senate trial began on January 7, 1999, overseen by Chief Justice William Rehnquist. On February 12 the Senate acquitted the president of the charge of perjury by a vote of 55–45, with 10 Republicans joining the 45 Democrats. The vote on the charge of obstruction of justice was 50–50, with 5 Republicans joining the Democrats. A number of senators who voted for acquittal were critical of the president’s behavior but said that the charges had not been proved beyond a reasonable doubt or, even if they had, did not constitute the “high crimes and misdemeanors” specified by the Constitution as grounds for removal from office.

(Read Monica Lewinsky’s Britannica essay on cyberbullying.)