Kansas Charley by Joan Jacobs Brumberg

Author:Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Argo-Navis

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Over the next four hours, Stoll and Taggart made their summaries to the twelve-man jury empowered to decide Charley’s fate. Each side now had the chance to rehash its best arguments, in its most persuasive language. Although the actual texts of these final arguments do not survive, the trial transcript provides a good guide for determining what each attorney thought was most important. Stoll wanted the jury to believe that the immoral and malicious Miller had stalked the two boys and killed them deliberately for their money; Taggart hoped that the jury could see the defendant as a victim of sorry circumstances and imperfect upbringing, all of which came together in an instant, causing him to act impulsively, if not insanely, in a manner he never had before. Charley’s fate depended on which narrative the jury considered most convincing, along with the directions they would receive from the judge as soon as Mr. Stoll stopped talking.

As he summed up, the shrewd Cheyenne prosecutor used a cattle metaphor to make the argument that the jury really had only two choices. There are “two horns to the dilemma,” he advised: either acquit the boy, or find him guilty of murder in the first degree. As the hours wore on, even the stalwart Walter Stoll weakened from the heat of so many bodies in the stuffy room, which could not be ventilated because of the fierce winds outside. Feeling some discomfort, Stoll cut his summary short, “completely exhausted.”

The following morning, he returned with vigor to say more about the “two horned dilemma,” and also to provide, as backup, an explanation of the distinction between murder in the first and second degrees. Because premeditation was the defining characteristic of a first-degree offense, Stoll belabored the point that Miller had hatched a plan to murder when he saw that his companions carried ample cash. “Conceived” and “conception” were words he used again and again.

In the end, Stoll probably did not have to work as hard as he did to make the case for first-degree murder, because the final instructions imparted to the jury by the presiding judge made it virtually impossible for them to find anything else. Judge Richard Scott told the jury that any murder performed in the act of robbery constituted murder in the first degree, and he proposed a definition of malice and premeditation that further supported that level of offense. If Miller was sane and there was no provocation, he said, then the defendant had displayed malice simply by the act of shooting Emerson and Fishbaugh. On the question of premeditation, the judge told the jury that it did not matter how much time it took for Miller to murder his companions, because premeditation could happen “in a flash,” a clear dismissal of Frank Taggart’s argument that his defendant had had no time to think before he acted. For the jury to find the boy insane, Scott said the defense must demonstrate that he was both “incapable of telling right from wrong” and also driven by an “uncontrollable impulse” to kill.

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