Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [151]
Curiously enough, not much is known about the day-to-day work of the courtroom in, say, 1800. Trial work and ordinary criminal process of the period are like a buried city, covered with the silt and garbage of time. Newspaper accounts, and a few trial transcripts (mostly of sensational cases), lift the curtain a bit. Reported cases, statutes, and official documents add something to the story.
People v. Weeks, the so-called Manhattan Well Mystery, gives us a glimpse of criminal justice at the beginning of the nineteenth century. On January 2, 1800, the body of a young woman, Gulielma Sands, was found in a well in New York. Miss Sands had lived with her cousin, Catherine Ring, in a boardinghouse on upper Greenwich Street. She was engaged to be married to Levi Weeks, another boarder. After her body was found, the finger of suspicion pointed, naturally, toward Weeks. A coroner’s inquest ended with a finding of willful murder, and the grand jury indicted Weeks. He made bail; the trial began on March 31, 1800. Alexander Hamilton appeared as counsel for the defense, along with Aaron Burr and Brockholst Livingston.3
It was a long and hotly contested case, for its time. About seventy-five witnesses appeared. The trial ended on April 2, 1800, at around three in the morning. Weeks had put up a vigorous defense, which included strong evidence of an alibi. The defense must have been powerfully persuasive; the jury took all of five minutes to bring in a verdict: not guilty.
Much of what we see in the pages of the transcript would be familiar to a modern lawyer—and indeed, fairly familiar to anyone who watches trial dramas on TV or in the movies. A panel of thirty-four prospective jurors was called. The defendant’s lawyer challenged some members of the panel. Some were excused for one reason or another; the Quakers on the panel “had scruples of conscience,” which prevented them from sitting on “a case of life and death.”bd After a certain amount of jockeying, twelve men were seated in the jury box. The jury heard the words of the indictment; prosecutor and defense made opening statements; witnesses for both sides testified and were cross-examined. The presiding judge then charged the jury—he “instructed” them on the law that applied to the case. After that, the jury “went out” and reached their (extremely rapid) verdict.
A major trial today might be fairly similar, in bold outline. The roles of judge and jury, the rhythm of witness and cross-examination-these have remained fundamentally unaltered. There were, no doubt, some local variations, local trial customs, local differences in codes of criminal procedure, nuances of selecting and charging a jury, and in carrying on a trial. The details tend to be, as we said, obscure. Some state courts were more formal than others. In South Carolina, the sessions courts, which handled serious crime, started off each term of court with a kind of parade to the courthouse, led by a sheriff, in a cocked hat and long coat, carrying a sword. A local parson read a sermon; the judge wore a black gown; and proceedings began with a cry of “Oyez! Oyez!”5 In Illinois, around 1818, on the other hand, judges held court “in log-houses, or in the barrooms of taverns”; in one circuit court, where the judge’s name was John Reynolds, court opened when the sheriff went into the courtyard and announced “Boys, come in, our John is going to hold court.”6
In People v. Weeks, all the jurors were men, and every one with an official role in the courtroom was male. This was true in every state. Witnesses apparently had a good deal of leeway to tell their stories uninterrupted; there was less fussing over minor points of evidence than would be true today, less shadowboxing over rules of procedure; the judge’s charge was looser, freer, more colloquial, more tailored to the particular case. One small but surprising