Not a Gentleman's Work by Gerard Koeppel

Author:Gerard Koeppel [Koeppel, Gerard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2020-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

THOUGH THREE PEOPLE were killed, prosecutor Hoar opted, for the trial at hand, to try Bram only for the murder of Captain Nash. Though the indictment was for all three victims, Nash’s was the only death with a supposed witness, Brown. Hoar kept open the possibility of trying Bram later for the other two deaths.

Bram’s trial started on December 14 with jury selection. Anticipation was high. “It will be one of the most remarkable murder cases known in this part of the country,” observed the Boston Herald, noting that the case lacked only one major item: a motive.

The trial was in the hands of two federal judges, district judge Nathan Webb (1825–1902) and circuit judge LeBaron Bradford Colt (1846–1924).

Colt knew something about weaponry and the law. For well over two decades after the 1862 death of his uncle Samuel, teams of Colts battled each other through many courts all the way to the Supreme Court over the famous gunmaker’s substantial estate. LeBaron and his immediate family eventually got nothing for their efforts, but in the meantime he graduated from Yale (where he, like Asa French after him, was a Bonesman) and Columbia Law and then became a prominent lawyer in Rhode Island, a federal district judge, and, in 1891, a judge on the newly created Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Webb graduated from Harvard the year Colt was born and went on to an unremarkable law career in his hometown, Portland, Maine, before his appointment in 1882 to the federal district court of Maine, the position he held until the year of his death.

As the handlers of Thomas Bram’s murder trial, the aging Webb would mostly defer to the younger but judicially senior Colt. The roles of both judges would be secondary to the performances of the accused, the principal witnesses, and the attorneys for the defense and prosecution.

The jury was chosen without much fuss in a little more than two hours, without getting past J in the pool:

Henry Arnold, lumber-mill owner, from Adams, declined appointment as foreman due to rheumatism in arm

Warren Blake, retired leather manufacturer, Woburn; his sister would die during the trial

Harry Booth, commercial traveler, Hyde Park, had employed Cotter six years earlier in a civil case

Oliver Briggs, carpenter and builder, Cambridge, the only Mason on the jury

Robert Brown, farmworker, West Newbury

Edward Burke, florist, Boston, son of a Boston police inspector

Sheperd Dyer, fireman, Plainfield, a Civil War veteran

Abel Ford, no profession, Hyde Park; like Booth, Ford was a former Cotter client

Stephen Green, shoemaker, Stoneham

Charles Howes, sailmaker, Chatham, eventually the last sailmaker on Cape Cod

John Hughes, stonemason, Adams

Rinaldo Jack, traveling flour and cereal salesman, Boston, named the foreman after Arnold declined

It was a jury of Bram’s peers in that the jurors were all men. That’s where any similarities stopped. They were all white and American born. The jurymen were paid two dollars a day (twice the Fuller crew witnesses) plus seventy-five cents for food per diem and were lodged in one large room on cots at the famous Quincy House, then downtown Boston’s largest hotel.

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