The Goffle Road Murders of Passaic County by Don Everett Smith Jr

Author:Don Everett Smith Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE DEFENSE’S CASE

There was little court-appointed defense attorneys Socrates Tuttle or William Gladhill could do to defend Jonston. The evidence against him was overwhelming. While it can be theorized that Tuttle and Gladhill did make a good effort, with the mountain of evidence against Jonston, all the two men could really do was safeguard Jonston’s civil rights for a fair trial and prevent him from being the victim of an enraged lynch mob.

THE VERDICT

“After an impromptu lucid and impartial charge by Judge Ogden, at about half past 4 o’clock,” the jury was sent out to deliberate. By 5:00 p.m., the jury had reached a guilty verdict “after an absence of about 20 minutes,” noted a reporter on the scene.87

According to the final judgment, Jonston, the “aforesaid laborer, not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by…the devil,” did “feloniously [and] willfully” with “malice aforethought, did make an assault” on Judge Van Winkle with a “certain knife of the value of 20 cents” and “did strike…the said John S. Van Winkle” deliberately “upon the belly a little below the navel” one “mortal wound, of the breadth of four inches and of the depth of two inches,” which caused the old judge to “languish” from “said mortal wound [until he] died.”88

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