Susan trial

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I'm already a fan, don't show this again. Send MSN Feedback. How can we improve? Please give an overall site rating:. Weather U. Station Info. Follow Us:. Share Tweet Email. By Jessica Willey. Share: Share Tweet Email. Anthony saw the commissioner's decision as a ticket to Supreme Court review, and began making plans with her lawyers to file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. By early January, Anthony was already trying to make political hay out of her arrest.

She sent off "hundreds of papers" concerning her arrest to suffragist friends and politicians. She still, however, found her situation difficult to comprehend: "I never dreamed of the U. Anthony's attorney, Henry Selden asked a U. District Judge in Albany, Nathan Hall, to issue a writ of habeas corpus ordering the release of Anthony from the marshal's custody. Hall denied Selden's request and said he would "allow defendant to go to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Anthony again refused to pay. Selden, however, decided to pay Anthony's bail with money from his own bank account. In the courtroom hallway following the hearing Anthony's other lawyer, John Van Voorhis, told Anthony that Selden's decision to pay her bail meant "you've lost your chance to get your case before the Supreme Court.

A disappointed Anthony still had a trial to face. On January 24, , a grand jury of twenty men returned an indictment against Anthony charging her with "knowingly, wrongfully, and unlawfully" voting for a member of Congress "without having a lawful right to vote, Anthony being then and there a person of the female sex.

Anthony saw the four months until her trial as an opportunity to educate the citizens of Rochester and surrounding counties on the issue of women suffrage. She took to the stump, speaking in town after town on the topic, " Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote? By mid-May, Anthony's exhausting lecture tour had taken her to every one of the twenty-nine post-office districts in Monroe County. To many in her audience, Anthony was the picture of "sophisticated refinement and sincerity.

Her smoothed hair was twisted neatly into a tight knot. She would look at her audience, ranging from a few dozen to over a hundred persons, and begin:. We ask the juries to fail to return verdicts of "guilty" against honest, law-abiding, tax-paying United States citizens for offering their votes at our elections. Or against intelligent, worthy young men, inspectors of elections, for receiving and counting such citizens votes. We ask the judges to render true and unprejudiced opinions of the law, and wherever there is room for a doubt to give its benefit on the side of liberty and equal rights to women, remembering that "the true rule of interpretation under our national constitution, especially since its amendments, is that anything for human rights is constitutional, everything against human right unconstitutional.

And it is on this line that we propose to fight our battle for the ballot-all peaceably, but nevertheless persistently through to complete triumph, when all United States citizens shall be recognized as equals before the law. Anthony responded to the judge's move by immediately launching a lecture tour in Ontario County.

Anthony spoke for twenty-one days in a row, finally concluding her tour in Canandaigua, the county seat, on the night before the opening of her trial. Going into the June trial, Anthony and her lawyers were somewhat less optimistic about the outcome than they had been a few months before. In April, the U. Supreme Court handed down its first two major interpretations of the recently enacted Civil War Amendments, rejected the claimed violations in both cases and construing key provisions narrowly.

Of special concern to Anthony was the Court's decision in Bradwell vs. Illinois , where the Court had narrowly interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause to uphold a state law that prohibited women from becoming lawyers.

In an April 27 letter, Anthony anxiously sought out Benjamin Butler's views of the decision, noting that "The whole Democratic press is jubilant over this infamous interpretation of the amendments. Even without the Supreme Court's narrow interpretation of the amendments, many observers expressed skepticism about the strength of Anthony's case.

An editorial in the New York Times concluded:. On June 17, , Anthony, wearing a new bonnet faced with blue silk and draped with a veil, walked up the steps of the Canandaigua courthouse on the opening day of her trial. The second-floor courtroom was filled to capacity. The spectators included a former president, Millard Fillmore, who had traveled over from Buffalo, where he practiced law. Judge Ward Hunt sat behind the bench, looking stolid in his black broadcloth and neck wound in a white neckcloth.

Anthony described Hunt as "a small-brained, pale-faced, prim-looking man, enveloped in a faultless black suit and a snowy white tie. Richard Crowley made the opening statement for the prosecution :. The main factual argument that the defense hoped to present was that Anthony reasonably believed that she was entitled to vote, and therefore could not be guilty of the crime of "knowingly" casting an illegal vote.

To support this argument, Henry Selden called himself as a witness to testify:. The prosecution called to the stand John Pound, an Assistant United States Attorney who had attended a January examination in which Anthony testified about her registration and vote. Pound testified that Anthony testified at that time that she did not consult Selden until after registering to vote. Selden, after conferring with Anthony, agreed that their meeting took place immediately after her registration, rather than before as his own testimony had suggested.

On cross-examination, Pound admitted that Anthony had testified at her examination that she had "not a particle" of doubt about her right as a citizen to vote.

With Pound's dismissal from the stand, the evidence closed and the legal arguments began. Selden opened his three-hour-long argument for Anthony by stressing that she was prosecuted purely on account of her gender:. Central to Selden's argument that Anthony cast a legal vote was the recently enacted Fourteenth Amendment:.

In her diary that night Anthony would angrily describe the trial as "the greatest judicial outrage history has ever recorded! We were convicted before we had a hearing and the trial was a mere farce.

A newspaper quoted one juror as saying, "Could I have spoken, I should have answered 'not guilty,' and the men in the jury box would have sustained me. It remains unclear who killed Nason. Everyone in that family suspected him for a good reason. He was a pedophile, he knew the victim, he lived close by.

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