Simpson, was charged with two counts of murder for the homicide of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, the entire country sat on the edge of our seats. This coverage was so intense that it caused for many delays to the trial, which ended up spanning 11 months. Witnesses began selling their stories to the tabloid press, which disqualified them from testifying in the hearing.
Ten jurors would be dismissed for various reasons over the course of the trial, leaving just four of the original jurors on the final panel. Upon month after month of grueling court proceedings and conflicting testimonies, Simpson was found not guilty of the crimes, sending shockwaves across the nation. You can learn more about the intricate details of this case here. While the O. But something about the charismatic psychopath captured the attention of many.
Bundy—who was considered to possess movie-star good looks— attracted the attention of many young females even after he was arrested for multiple murders and sexual assaults. Bundy not only received hundreds of love letters from female fans while in prison, but it was also a common occurrence for young, attractive women to line the rows of his trial, hoping to get a glimpse of him.
The fascinating criminal opted to represent himself at trial—of which one of those memorable moments included his proposal to his devoted girlfriend and champion of his innocence, Carole Anne Boone, while he questioned her on the stand.
Bundy was actually on trial multiple times—he managed to escape a courtroom and jail before his final capture and trial. Ultimately, his actions resulted in three separate murder convictions, all of which were accompanied by death sentences. He was executed by electrocution in America was riveted by the Casey Anthony case from the moment she was arrested for allegedly killing her two-year-old daughter, Caylee, in The trial was a media circus, with every possible outlet reporting on updates in the case multiple times per day.
Anthony—who waited an entire month before reporting her daughter missing—went on trial for the murder in with the death penalty on the table.
After nearly 11 hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted her of the murder charge, but found her guilty of four misdemeanor counts of giving false information to law enforcement two of which were later dropped. It was a verdict that completely shocked the nation.
On the evening of February 26, , Martin was walking home after picking up some snacks at a local convenience store. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, spotted him and deemed the hoodie-clad teenager suspicious. The neighborhood was one known for its fair share of petty crime—with calls to the police between January 1, and February 26, —so Zimmerman, who had a documented history of phoning the police to report suspicious-looking activity, called it in.
Little is known about what exactly happened next. The dispatcher instructed Zimmerman to stop following Martin. After the call ended, there was a violent encounter between the two that culminated Zimmerman fatally shooting the year-old, who was just 70 yards from his home. The proceedings included three weeks of testimony and a litany of expert witnesses for both the prosecution and the defense.
In July of , the all-female jury declared Zimmerman innocent of all charges. You can learn more about the tragic circumstances surrounding this case here. The murder of Laci Peterson and her unborn son hijacked the attention of the nation for many reasons.
She went missing on Christmas Eve of , was eight months pregnant at the time, her smile was magnetic and her marriage to her husband, Scott, was, by all accounts, picture perfect. But investigators had their suspicions. Fundamental issues of morality, political expediency, justice and social change are being engaged. How does one balance freedom of conscience against the public good? How does one contest unarguable social evils when the sheer weight of political institutions is against one?
To what extent do legal systems deliver true justice? An investigation of famous trials in history takes in such great historical figures as Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, Sir Thomas More and Mandela as well as the famous Dreyfus case, the Nazi war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, the Stalinist purges and the revolutionary chaos that engulfed England and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The great American criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow duly makes an appearance, as do such varied and heterogeneous figures as Oscar Wilde, John Brown, Madeleine Smith and the Tolpuddle martyrs.
Frank McLynn presents evidence from thirty-four different trials drawn from military, ecclesiastical and civilian court cases, not to mention special courts and tribunals, taking in all eras and covering a dozen different countries. It is not too much to say that the world we live in has been shaped in part by the decisions and results of these trials.
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May 01, Erynn rated it liked it Shelves: ebook-nook. This wasn't a bad book and it was very interesting to see the trends throughout history's trials. There were several trials, though, that I was completely unaware of, i. Whistler v Ruskin, and a few that I knew about, i. Leopold and Loeb, the Rosenburgs' trial, Joan of Arc's you get the picture. It laid out a brief summary or history of each trial before going into further detail which I think was a good idea.
If you weren't familiar with some o This wasn't a bad book and it was very interesting to see the trends throughout history's trials. If you weren't familiar with some of the trials, you get to find out the ending of the trial and then read how it got to that point - in most cases there were some where you had to read through to get to the conclusion. I was a little disappointed that I didn't see a few other famous trials, like Lizzie Borden's or the Lincoln Assassination trial, but the content was good, and adequately satisfying, for what it contained.
I do recommend reading this book if only to get a teaser into some of the famous trials in history, like the Nuremberg trial. Famous Trials compiles a list of the best known trials in legal history with a brief overview of the facts and situations, back stories and at times postscripts on the characters involved.
As a paralegal, I found this book fascinating with just the right balance of information on the trials to provide basic background, but not too much detail to overwhelm. The play would become known as Chicago. They then murdered Franks in a car rented with a fake name and dumped his mutilated body near the Indiana border. That specific type and design of eyeglass frame had been sold to only three people in all of Chicago, and Leopold was one of them.
The two were brought in for questioning, and soon Loeb confessed to the murders. The trial became a magnet for media frenzy, not least because the families hired none other than Clarence Darrow to lead the defense. Knowing that the jury pool had been tainted by relentless newspaper coverage, Darrow managed to avoid a jury trial and likely death penalty conviction by having his clients plead guilty, which would leave the sentencing up to the judge.
Darrow used the case to highlight and question aspects of American culture and its justice system as they pertained to punishment and the supposed worth of human life. This came in the form of a hour closing argument , one that touched on everything from morality and nature to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.
The marathon speech is still revered by legal scholars because it helped Darrow do the impossible: spare the lives of two killers who were guilty as sin. Loeb and Leopold were both sentenced to life imprisonment.
Loeb was later murdered by another inmate; Leopold was paroled 34 years later and lived out his life in Puerto Rico. Scopes, a substitute biology teacher, was arrested for violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee law that banned the teaching of evolution in schools.
The small Tennessee county would host the two biggest lawyers in the country: Clarence Darrow again , who was on the team that represented Scopes, and William Jennings Bryan, a former presidential candidate, who was part of the prosecution. The proceedings were covered by the dozens of gathered reporters representing papers from around the country. Famous journalist H.
Mencken provided colorful correspondence from Tennessee for The Baltimore Sun , and supposedly coined the term Monkey Trial. It was the first trial in America to be broadcast on national radio. The proceedings were packed with dramatic moments, including Darrow calling Bryan to the stand to question him on the veracity of the Bible.
The jury found Scopes guilty, though the attention brought on by the trial increased scrutiny on the Butler Act and laws like it. In , the corpses of Eleanor Mills and Edward Hall were found in a field in New Jersey, their bodies positioned intimately next to each other with ripped-up love letters sprinkled between them. Hall's widow and her two brothers were charged with the murders, and the tawdry case became a magnet for the press Hall was a minister; Mills sang in the church choir.
At the time, however, it was the biggest news story in the entire country. Who could ever forget the Pig Woman? On March 1, , the infant son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh went missing from the family's home in New Jersey. Adding to the hoopla were sound cameras, used for the first time by the press in the coverage of a criminal trial.
The press coverage went so overboard and interfered with the proceedings to such a great affect that the American Bar Association issued a report begging for legislation to curb the media.
Hauptmann was found guilty and sentenced to death. Daughter of famous railroad heir Reginald Vanderbilt and his much younger socialite wife Gloria Mercedes Morgan, Gloria Vanderbilt achieved celebrity status just by being born. Her father died after a life of heavy drinking when Gloria was 18 months old, and both she and her immense trust fund went to her hard-partying mother.
After almost two months of mud-slinging, the court awarded Gertrude Whitney custody of her niece. One newspaper summed up the verdict with parody song lyrics , highlighting the kind of devastating, compassion-free coverage readers had come to expect:. The military tribunals of 22 Nazi leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity were held between November 20, , and October 1, , and they proved to be greater in consequence and profundity than perhaps any other trial in history.
This practice follows a sort of natural law of journalism. Just now it gives the Nuremberg trials a back seat. We learned a while back that the defendants were believed to be responsible for at least 6 million murders.
What we have been getting in the past few days are details about some of these murders … [t]hey are not new, because the evidence had already run through every conceivable bestiality. But it would be well if we paid attention to them. In , two years after the Soviet Union detonated their first atomic bomb test, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were tried and convicted for conspiracy to commit espionage by giving nuclear secrets to the U.
Ethel and Julius both denied any involvement, but their month-long trial concluded with a guilty verdict and the death penalty.
The Rosenbergs were the only American citizens executed for espionage during the Cold War; they were killed by the electric chair on June 19, Plain deliberate contemplated murder is dwarfed in magnitude by comparison with the crime you have committed. In committing the act of murder, the criminal kills only his victim … Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.
No one can say that we do not live in a constant state of tension. Naturally, the trial helped accelerate Cold War paranoia in America. On July 3, , osteopath Sam Sheppard fell asleep while watching TV with his pregnant wife in their home in the Cleveland suburbs.
When he came to, his wife was dead, and he would soon be charged with her murder. Local and national media went wild with the case—to the point of tampering with it. The Cleveland Press pushed and pushed for the state to take action against the doctor. Sheppard was arrested that night. Sheppard was convicted for the murder of his wife in the second degree in He successfully appealed the ruling in and, in , the United States Supreme Court reversed the murder charge. Their decision placed the blame , in part, on the media.
Following a second trial, Sheppard was found not guilty. Eichmann was a high-ranking Nazi SS lieutenant colonel whose decisions were key to shaping the Holocaust. After World War II he managed to escape to Buenos Aires, where he lived comfortably for around a decade until his capture in by a team of Israeli security and intelligence agents.
After being brought to Israel, Eichmann stood trial for a number of crimes, including crimes against humanity. The proceedings were videotaped and broadcast by press outlets around the world, making it one of the first truly international media events. This was intentional; the trial served as a reminder of the suffering endured by victims of the Holocaust, given that, at the time of the trial, the events of World War II had concluded a full 16 years prior.
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