WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME. Lise Pearlman
skewed against wage earners, but the two sides ultimately agreed on twelve men. All of the jurors had started out as farmers or ranchers. One had since become a real estate agent, another a construction foreman and one a building contractor. Eleven of the bewhiskered men were over fifty. (Darrow’s other rule of thumb was: “Old men are generally more charitable and kindly disposed than young men; they have seen more of the world and understand it.”)27 Eight were Republicans, three Democrats and one a Prohibitionist. Like the Thaw jury in New York earlier that year, the men were sequestered for the duration of the trial. They were permitted to read newspapers only after deputies cut out any coverage of the case. Of course, some of them had read slanted local articles against the WFM leadership before they were picked for the jury panel.
Both teams had secretly conducted extensive investigation of eligible jurors in advance. The defense team eventually discovered that their chief intelligence gatherer was a Pinkerton spy, who skewed his reports and copied them to the other side. The defense may have planted its own mole on the prosecution side. It was an era known for corrupt tactics, and this was an extraordinarily high stakes case. By the time the ten peremptory challenges for each side were used up, the prosecution was satisfied, but the defense hoped only for a hung jury. Darrow and his co-counsel were painfully aware that most of the men had voted for, done business with or otherwise had been familiar with Governor Steunenberg, including one juror who boarded the governor in his Boise home for two years. Only one juror had ever been a member of a trade union. Socialist papers were even more pessimistic. They assumed the panel had already made up their minds to do the prosecution’s bidding.
Prosecutor William Borah deliberately sought to inflame the jury with his claim that the trial was for a crime “a thousand times worse than murder.” It was “anarchy displaying its first bloody triumph in Idaho.”28 A parade of prosecution witnesses took the stand to describe Steunenberg’s violent, agonizing death and the poorly groomed stranger spotted casing the farmhouse beforehand. The spectators in the packed courtroom were mesmerized when the confessed bomber finally took the stand. McParland had worked hard maintaining the good will of the assassin now known as Harry Orchard and in keeping him well-guarded from retaliation. Over the sixteen months since Orchard’s arrest, McParland had also “transformed [him] from [an] unshaven, ill-kempt, shifty-eyed felon” to a “carefully attired” and “manicured” man who “might be a Sunday School superintendent.”29
Orchard, a forty-year-old Canadian whose real name was Albert Horsley, had been accompanied into the courtroom by armed guards. The doors were then locked to keep out the overflow crowd of hundreds of men and women anxious to get a glimpse of the governor’s assassin. Inside the courtroom, deputies and plainclothes detectives provided additional security. The remarkably composed star witness then testified in a low, credible monotone for several days, detailing his career as a union terrorist. He claimed that he had participated in the 1899 bombing of the compression mill in Wardner and that he set the bomb in 1904 at a Colorado train depot, killing thirteen scabs. He claimed to have targeted several other political enemies of the WFM, detailing an aborted attempt on the life of Colorado’s ex-governor and two members of its Supreme Court. Then came the damning testimony that was intended to seal the prosecutors’ case: that Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone promised Orchard several hundred dollars and a ranch if he assassinated Steunenberg to intimidate other WFM adversaries.
The newly beefed up Western Union office worked at a record pace to transmit the news to the nation from the hordes of mainstream and Socialist reporters who had descended on Boise to cover the story firsthand. Collier’s Weekly magazine described Orchard as “the most remarkable witness that ever appeared in an American court of justice.”30 New York Times correspondent O. K. Davis proclaimed that the witness “upon whose testimony the whole case against Haywood, Moyer, and the other leaders of the Western Federation of Miners is based” told “a horrible, revolting, sickening story . . . as simply as the plainest . . . most ordinary incident . . . and as it went on, hour after hour, with multitudinous detail, clear and vivid here, half-forgotten and obscure there, gradually it forced home to the listener the conviction that it was the unmixed truth.”31
Though Judge Wood was incensed at the prosecution for permitting jailhouse interviews of Orchard to influence public opinion during the trial, Wood privately agreed with Davis’s assessment of Orchard’s credibility. Unbeknownst to the parties, the judge and the New York Times correspondent took several weekend fly fishing trips together during the pendency of the trial.
Meanwhile, observers could not help but notice that WFM’s pompous Colorado counsel, Edmund Richardson, had difficulty sharing the leadership of the defense team with the equally egotistical Darrow. The two often disagreed vociferously on strategy, but Darrow reluctantly deferred to Richardson when he insisted on cross-examining Orchard. Though the veteran WFM lawyer brought considerable skills to his grilling of the state’s star witness, most observers believed Orchard easily won that courtroom match-up. (In the next trial of WFM’s George Pettibone, when Orchard was again the chief witness, Darrow conducted the cross-examination himself. He was credited with doing a masterful job of discrediting Orchard as a convicted felon, bigamist, company spy and tool of Pinkerton’s agency. The jury reportedly responded by recoiling from Orchard as if he were “the carcass of a dead animal.”)32
Yet, in Haywood’s trial, Richardson scored some points. Even after months of preparation, Orchard’s story was confusing. He claimed to be a paid assassin of the union, but acknowledged that some of the misdeeds he committed were on his own initiative or that of the mine owners. None of the state’s witnesses was able to corroborate the complicity of the WFM leader in Orchard’s dastardly act in Caldwell. Before trial, one of Orchard’s alleged collaborators had disappeared without a trace, and another, Steve Adams, retracted his own confession at the urging of Clarence Darrow. Detective McParland suspected that Darrow bribed Adams, but had no proof. The prosecution was forced to rely only on circumstantial evidence to support Orchard’s conspiracy claim. The defense in the Haywood trial put on a hundred of its own witnesses, including Haywood, who denied all of Orchard’s charges.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:James_mcparland_pinkerton_agency.jpg
Pinkerton agent James McParland (left), then the most famous detective in America, arrested Albert Horsley (a.k.a. Harry Orchard) (pictured below) for Steunenberg’s assassination. McParland then groomed Horsley as the star witness for the prosecution against the leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, whom McParland kidnapped from Colorado to face the death penalty for allegedly conspiring to hire Horsley to kill Steunenberg. McParland cleaned Horsley up to look far more presentable at trial. One reporter described the transformation as turning an “unshaven, ill-kempt, shifty-eyed felon” into a “carefully attired” and “manicured” man who “might be a Sunday School superintendent” (John E. Nevins, Milwaukee Journal, June 6, 1907, 1)
Source: http://www.3rd1000.com/history3/events/cdamines/1892-1899.htmp
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27122232
Harry Orchard (left) when arrested in 1906 and (right) in 1907 as star witness for the prosecution of Big Bill Haywood
In the follow-up trial of WFM leader George Pettibone, Darrow destroyed Orchard’s credibility – revealing him as a convicted felon, bigamist, company spy and tool of Pinkerton’s agency. The jury recoiled from Orchard as if he were “the carcass of a dead animal” (Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense, New York: Signet Books, 1941, 1969), 280.
It was customary at the time for closing arguments to last up to a day and a half apiece.