The Court of Last Resort by Erle Stanley Gardner

Author:Erle Stanley Gardner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504043458
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

9

It must not be thought that all of our cases resulted in triumphant vindications of our judgment, or in demonstrations of a defendant’s innocence.

We encountered a good many cases where we felt certain that the defendant had been wrongfully convicted, but where there was no opportunity to prove our point. In other words, we couldn’t get any more evidence than had been available at the time of the original hearing.

As every lawyer knows, it is an axiom of law that it is impossible to prove a negative. Unless we could find some new, positive piece of evidence tending to make it definitely appear there had either been false testimony or a wrong interpretation placed upon evidence which had been collected, there was nothing we could do.

On the other hand, there were many, many cases where a preliminary examination indicated promise, and we’d start digging away at the facts with all the diligence of a dog scratching away at a rabbit hole, only to find out either that the facts in the case had been misrepresented to us, or that, after all, the defendant was guilty.

It is, of course, natural for a prison inmate to lie about his conviction. In the first place if he is guilty it is second nature with him to lie, and in the second place he has, as far as he individually is concerned, everything to gain and nothing to lose.

A man is convicted and the main evidence against him is perhaps circumstantial, or hinges upon some one point, one circumstance, the testimony of one witness. The defendant goes to prison and has plenty of time to think. He begins to canvass all possible explanations, all of the stories he might have told which would have accounted for and explained away this bit of evidence.

It is surprising how adroit a man can become at doing this. In the course of time he works out an explanation, and rehearses that explanation until he believes it himself. He can recite it so convincingly that it sounds perfectly logical and true.

Most of the time which we were able to donate to work on the Court of Last Resort was consumed in separating the wheat from the chaff. In far too many instances what looked like good hard wheat turned out to be chaff.

One typical case which comes to mind is that of T. R. McClure, a personable, twenty-one-year-old Negro who was wanted for murder in the state of Ohio. He wasn’t apprehended until two years or so after the commission of the murder. This young man was extremely plausible. He had no prior record, and the story which he told caused us a great deal of concern. He insisted that the prosecution had been able to convict him only by putting on a ballistics expert who had engaged in a lot of “double talk.” He had been sentenced to death in the electric chair.

At that time Ohio was not particularly sympathetic with the Court of Last Resort. However, as

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.