Forgotten News by Jack Finney

Author:Jack Finney [Finney, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Published: 1983-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

The prosecution abruptly rested, but Judge Davies didn't adjourn. There were some hours left of the day, so he simply directed the defense to begin—immediately. And Henry Clinton stood up, walked to the jury box, and began: "May it please the Court. Gentlemen of the Jury: Although not altogether unaccustomed to address Juries in capital cases, I have never done so under the circumstances which surround the present case. I have never before arisen to address a Jury where the prosecution, after closing their evidence, had so utterly failed to point even the finger of well-grounded suspicion toward the prisoner at the bar, as in the present instance…."

I think Clinton might very effectively have stopped right there, but of course he didn't. Orations were de rigueur, possibly the jury might have felt cheated, and Clinton went on, did a good job of denouncing the D.A.'s denunciation, and then rivaled him in oratory: "… the anguish which wrung her soul when scarce three short years ago the husband of her youth was entombed beneath the sod … when she lay stretched upon the bed of sickness herself, as she supposed, about to be drifted into the oceans of eternity …" (During this part "Mrs. Cunningham was in tears, and the Jury listened with much interest and attention.") "Suddenly there shone out from the horizon, not that star of Bethlehem, whose serene and hallowed light had pierced the darkness of her affliction, as the grave … had closed over the lifeless form of her husband and her earthly hopes, which were all entombed—but the baneful star of her destiny—her ill-fated union with Dr. Harvey Burdell…." Etc.

But there wasn't too much of that; just enough. Clinton then summed up the prosecution's evidence, in his client's favor; pointed out its clear deficiencies by referring to witnesses who hadn't been called; and said he'd call some of them himself for the defense.

Among his witnesses was a professor of surgery at New York Medical College who said the Doctor's wounds were made by a person with both anatomical knowledge and great strength. Why great strength? Because the professor had propped up a naked corpse in sitting position, and then had a couple of students (who surely got A's) stab the dead body in various places. This didn't take much force, but then they dressed the corpse in underclothes, shirt, and heavy outer clothing, the students went at it again, and this time it took a lot of force to plunge those daggers in; sometimes a dagger actually recoiled.

Dr. Walter B. Roberts talked about the good relations he'd often seen between Emma Cunningham and Harvey Burdell. Ten-year-old Georgie Cunningham gave a very persuasive child's-eye picture of a calm domestic evening before the murder, spent in preparing sister Helen to go off to boarding school in the morning. (Incidentally, when George undressed that night in this pre-petroleum age, nearly all of America's oil still lying untouched belowground, his room was lighted with "a sperm candle" made from whale oil.

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