Justice Thomas temporarily blocks Graham testimony in Georgia death penalty case – The Washington Post
Justice Thomas temporarily blocks Graham testimony in Georgia death penalty case – The Washington Post
Justice Thomas temporarily blocks Graham testimony in Georgia death penalty case – The Washington Post
WASHINGTON – In the hours after the execution of John William Wilkes Booth, the man widely believed to have been the trigger man for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared, “This is no time for a constitutional crisis, where passions are inflamed to the point of destruction” and threatened to stop the proceedings.
The same Justice, in a statement that set the stage for the day’s events on Oct. 21, delivered at the conclusion of a trial that had begun three months earlier, declared in the hours before the scheduled execution that the “foulest of all conspiracies” was that “the conspirators were trying to cover up what happened.”
For Holmes, the trial had been an attempt to discover evidence of conspiracy against his friend Abraham Lincoln, for whom Holmes had fought while he was at the bar and judge.
But the case had begun to unravel. The judge had stopped all the testimony of witnesses before the jury had seen any of the evidence, because of the strong feelings that Justice Holmes had against the conspiracy he believed was trying to cover up the assassination.
With one witness refusing to appear, when asked by the court for her story of the crime, and another testifying that the assassination was the work of other conspirators, the judge had announced that he would declare a recess in the trial.
When it resumed the next morning, Holmes was more than ready to declare that he had seen enough and that evidence had been offered that was not admissible in court.
“The first part at least of the case against the conspirators is closed,” declared Holmes, who would become the most celebrated Chief Justice in the nation’s history and later become one of the most distinguished legal thinkers.
But, he added, “the second part may well be left unanswered.”
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