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Sexual misconduct and jealousy were at the root of Hall-Mills, or seemed to be; thus, like so many of the show cases, the trial was a kind of morality play. The audience was the courtroom public and the wider world of newspaper readers. In such cases, the great trial lawyers pulled out all the stops, as they had in earlier times. In 1918, Elmer Hupp of Cleveland shot Charles Joyce, a salesman, in Hupp’s home. This was a “love triangle.” Hupp supposedly shot Joyce, his wife’s lover, in a “red rage” to protect the sanctity of his home. The Hupps had a daughter, Consuelo, a “winsome, cream and pink blonde girl,” fourteen years old. When the attorneys made their “impassioned plea” to the jury, Consuelo “sobbed convulsively,” her “arms about the neck of her father.” The lawyers begged the jury to put “sunshine in the little girl’s heart.” One of the lawyers cried out, “We can’t have people ask this little girl, ‘Where is your Daddy?’ and have her answer ‘He’s in the penitentiary. ’”57 The jury acquitted Hupp on March 7, 1918, after two hours and two ballots.58

The most sensational trial of 1927 was the trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray for the murder of Ruth’s husband, Albert. The two defendants, who seemed obviously guilty, were tried together. The only hope for Ruth was to put all the blame on Judd, while the only hope for Judd was to do likewise to Ruth. Judd’s lawyer called Ruth “a poisonous snake,” a “serpent” who “drew Judd Gray into her glistening coils.... This woman ... was abnormal; possessed of an all-consuming, all-absorbing sexual passion, animal lust, which seemingly was never satisfied.” Poor Judd was “enslaved ... like a human mannikin, like a human dummy. Whatever she wanted he did.”59 Ruth Snyder’s lawyer paid him back in kind, and the jury convicted both of them. They went to the chair in 1928.

But hardly any case of the century could match, for sheer notoriety, the kidnap-murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby, and the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for this crime in 1935. Lindbergh was a national hero; and to steal and kill a baby was a crime guaranteed to horrify every parent in the country. The trial was a media circus. It hit Flemington, New Jersey, like a “tomado.” There was an “avalanche” of spectators, who tried to squeeze in to see a trial that was, according to H. L. Mencken, the greatest story since the Resurrection. There were over three hundred news-people and more than one hundred cameramen; a tangle of forty-five direct lines carried the news to places as far off as Sydney, Australia, and Buenos Aires. At a local airstrip, a dozen planes a day brought film to New York to feed the insatiable appetites of the press. Hauptmann was convicted, and died in the electric chair. The media tumult at the trial was such that, in 1937, two years after it was over, the American Bar Association (ABA) adopted a judicial “canon” (ethical rule) that banned courtroom photography or radio coverage of trials. In 1952, the ABA amended the ban to include television. (The ban disintegrated in the 1970s, when over twenty states came to allow cameras in the courtroom.) 60

Could a trial be so sensational, the publicity so inflated, that the defendant’s rights were compromised? The issue came to a head in two Supreme Court cases. In Estes v. Texas (1965),61 Billie Sol Estes had been convicted of swindling in a federal court in Texas. He was accused of a scam involving the sale of fertilizer tanks and equipment to farmers. The case gained intense national attention, and it was standing-room-only in the courtroom. Initial hearings were carried live on radio and television. There were more than a dozen cameramen in the courtroom: “Cables and wires were snaked across the courtroom floor, three microphones were on the judge’s bench and others were beamed at the jury box and the counsel table.”62 At the trial itself, the cameramen were more restrained: they worked out of a booth at the back of the courtroom. But the Supreme Court reversed the conviction. In its opinion, this kind of media carnival deprived