The last shall be first. The final in this series of trial essays also concerns the earliest of the covered trials. The trial before 500 male jurors began in the agora, in the center of Athens, over 2,400 years...
Famous Trials Legal Analysis of History's Greatest Courtroom Confrontations
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The debate over whether scientific teaching ought to conform with literalist interpretations of the Bible did not begin, as many assume, with the trial of John Scopes in 1925. Three centuries earlier in Rome, Galileo Galilei faced trial before...
The fate of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother recently convicted for having drowned her five young children in a bathtub, may well have been tied to the trial of John Hinckley. When a Washington D.C. jury found Hinckley "not...
When I mentioned to two of my colleagues that I was considering creating a website on the trial of Jesus, puzzled looks appeared on their faces. "I wouldn't touch that trial with a ten-foot pole," one colleague said, "all...
It's been just over a decade since we all saw--over and over--the horrifying video images of three white Los Angeles Police Department officers beating and kicking an African-American motorist, Rodney King. Next spring will mark the tenth anniversary of...
For over 100 years, power in American courtrooms has gradually shifted to judges and away from jurors. Trial attorneys today are severely restricted in their ability to inform jurors of their power (if not their right) to decide the...
For millions of Americans, understanding of the remarkable story of the Africans of the schooner Amistad comes not from school or reading historical non-fiction, but rather from the mind of Steven Spielberg, producer of the 1997 movie based loosely...
Eighty years ago this month, near the height of the Red Scare, the trial of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti opened in Dedham, Massachusetts. The convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti for murder in connection with a payroll...
Ninety-five years ago this month, justices of the U. S. Supreme Court met on a Sunday morning in the home of Chief Justice Melville Fuller to debate the fate of Ed Johnson, a black man convicted and sentenced to die...
The election of 2000 was not the first time that America voted for president and then settled back to watch the trials. In 1872, Susan B. Anthony, for the only time in her life, voted in a federal election--"the straight...
