Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [162]
In some of these cases, the line between justice and show business became quite fuzzy. Hordes of people tried to force their way into the courtroom. They lined up early in the morning to get seats. In the days before movies and TV, a good trial was a great spectator sport. The newspapers of the 1880s and 1890s, of course, reported the show for the curious millions who were not lucky enough to squeeze into the courtroom.
No case in the history of American criminal justice was as famous as the trial of Lizzie Borden, rising out of the tragedy in Fall River, Massachusetts. 70 This mystery tantalized its contemporaries, and still exercises a kind of eerie fascination a century later. On the outside, nothing appeared more normal than the comfortable house in Fall River, where Andrew J. Borden, a rich man from an old family, lived with his second wife, Abby. Borden’s first wife had died long before, leaving him two daughters, Emma and Lizzie, both unmarried. There was also an Irish servant-girl. It was a close, churchgoing, modest family, and from the outside, a model of propriety and American respectability.
But something was radically wrong behind the lace curtains. The murders took place on a day that was hot, stifling, unbearable; not a breath of air was stirring. In that close atmosphere, Lizzie, choked and strangling with repressed hatred, perhaps reached her breaking point. At any rate, somebody, on that still morning, savagely murdered Abby Borden with an ax and left her body in an upstairs room while the blood congealed. An hour or so later, Andrew returned from business in town. He lay down on a sofa, took off his shoes, and, as he rested, the ax descended again and cracked open his skull. Emma was out of town; only Lizzie and Bridget, the maid, were about the house—as far as anybody knows.
Lizzie was arrested and charged with the crime. Armies of reporters descended on the scene. The press made a martyr out of Lizzie. She must have been falsely accused. She was a woman, a daughter, a spinster. She came to symbolize, in a way, American innocence. The jury chose to believe in the symbol. Such a person was simply incapable of violent crime. It must have been a stranger, or the maid, or somebody, some alien force, some tramp, some foreigner with a hatchet—anybody but the stiffly buttoned, silent woman sitting demurely in the courtroom. The charge to the jury was, to say the least, tilted in Lizzie’s favor. The jury found her not guilty and sent her home. The trial passed into legend, and there it remains.
Crime and punishment, as we have said, are unique social indicators, mirrors of society—distorted mirrors, perhaps, funhouse mirrors, or cracked mirrors; but even the distortions are symptomatic and systematic. Major courtroom trials, even though they are posed, hypocritical, stage-managed, even though they sift and twist facts, and distort evidence for the sake of making points, are nonetheless extremely telling; at times they can lay bare the soul of a given society.
The great cases served a number of functions. Since they were theater, they helped underscore and teach the rules of the game. They presented in dramatic form the norms of community life. These were crude popular norms; the rhetoric was shrill, exaggerated, the quality of the theater was often very low; much of it was too melodramatic for our current tastes. But these shows were messengers, preachers; they carried tales of conventional morality, stories of evil and good, to the audience inside and outside the courtroom.71 Conventional morality, too, defined