Rising Road by Davies Sharon;

Author:Davies, Sharon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2010-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

EIGHT | Black Robes, White Robes

WHEN JOE TATE was unable to secure an indictment before the scheduled time for the preliminary hearing, his senior assistants, James G. Davis and John P. McCoy, had no choice but to begin calling witnesses in a much more public forum: before Judge H. B. Abernethy in the Jefferson County Court of Misdemeanors. The event had all the hallmarks of public spectacle. Hours before the courtroom’s doors were scheduled to open, overeager court watchers had flooded the second floor hallway outside Judge Abernethy’s courtroom in numbers so great that the deputies assigned to keep order worried whether they would be able “to restrain the throngs.” Finally somebody observed that the room normally occupied by Judge Abernethy was simply too small, and hasty arrangements were made to channel the deluge upstairs, to Circuit Judge Dan A. Greene’s courtroom, one of the largest in the building. Despite the move, in no time “every available seat was occupied,” and hundreds of would-be spectators had to be turned away. Yet some who were denied entry refused to leave, contenting themselves with a small spot in the hall, “craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the witnesses as they passed to and from the witness stand, and of the accused man as he entered the courtroom.”1

Stephenson was escorted into the room just minutes before 2:00 P.M. The minister looked “a little haggard,” a reporter for the Age-Herald thought, but likely his spirits lifted some once he was surrounded by three of his lawyers, his wife, and other family and friends who had come to offer their support. Only Hugo Black, still in Colorado, was missing. Displaying a penchant for promptness, Judge Abernethy called the case to order precisely on the hour.

James Davis and John McCoy were Joe Tate’s two most senior assistants; the ones he had hired to beat Hugo Black out of becoming the lead prosecuting attorney for the county. The men Black had resigned as county solicitor over, rather than be forced to accept as his assistants.2 Whatever Black had thought of them back in 1917, by the time of Edwin Stephen-son’s preliminary hearing in the summer of 1921, Davis and McCoy had eight years of prosecutorial experience between them, and McCoy brought something else to the case as well—personal insight into the ill will so many Protestants harbored toward Catholics. Born and raised in Jefferson County, McCoy had close connections to the Methodist church: his father, William Clark McCoy, held a pastorate in the church, and his brother, James Henry McCoy, was a bishop in the M.E.C., South. To the extent that religious furor was behind the crush of observers who had flocked to the courtroom just to watch a preliminary hearing that day, Joe Tate’s assistants were not likely to underestimate it.

The prosecutors had no intention of feeding the public’s frenzy over the case any more than was necessary. The men had agreed that Davis would take the lead in questioning the witnesses, while McCoy made sure they were ready to go as soon as their names were called.

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