Books: A Criminal’s Best Friend

FINAL VERDICT (512 pp.)—Adela Rogers St. Johns—Doubleday ($5.95).

Many of the great criminal lawyers are as famous for their dramatic ability as for their legal skills. But none ever made a courtroom more theatrical than Earl Rogers, a dandyish, hard-drinking, devil-may-care Californian who practiced at the turn of the century. Rogers won acquittals no one thought possible with courtroom antics never seen before—and no longer tolerated in today’s courts. And Rogers was, by common consent, the fastest tongue in the West.

No one could be indifferent to Rogers. His biographer and only daughter, Adela Rogers St. Johns, is fiercely partisan. A onetime Hearst reporter, Adela trailed her father to court from the age of eight. When her mother left home, Adela even accompanied him to his favorite brothel and joined one of the girls in duets on the piano. She protected Rogers, she admits, with the devotion of a tigress, and she is protecting him still. But out of her book’s gushing prose Rogers emerges as a remarkably earthy personality, part rapscallion, part Robin Hood.

Terror at the Bar. Rogers shocked his profession by defending anybody who asked for help, guilty or not. His clients were usually up for murder, but he also defended policemen about to be sacked, prostitutes faced with deportation, and an old pal plainly guilty of defrauding a bank. After one acquittal, Rogers snarled to his client, who came to thank him: “Get away from me, you slimy pimp; you’re guilty as hell.”

Rogers was a terror in the courtroom. His pet technique was ridicule. Peering disdainfully at a witness through his lorgnette, flashing his mordant wit, he often provoked the jury to laughter—a near-sure sign he had won his case.

Adela proudly notes that Rogers was the first trial lawyer to make extensive use of props. To demonstrate the direction of a bullet that had killed a man, Rogers brought the dead man’s small intestines into court. “Ghoul, grave robber!” shouted the prosecutor, but Rogers won the case. In a morals case, police witnesses claimed they had watched the crime through holes in a door. Rogers lugged the door into court. He placed the defendant behind the door, put a girl on his lap, and invited judge and jury to peep through the door. None of them could see the defendant, who was forthwith acquitted.

Saving Outcasts. When graft scandals broke in San Francisco in 1907, Rogers won national fame. He agreed to defend two top executives of a local streetcar company, accused of bribing city officials. Rogers’ opponent in the case was the fiery Francis J. Heney, a friend of President Theodore Roosevelt. In the course of a tumultuous trial, someone shot at Rogers, barely missing. Someone else shot Heney in court and almost killed him. Weeks later, Heney reappeared with a hideous scar, only one eye, and plenty of public sympathy. But Rogers won his case by proving that some of Heney’s associates in the prosecution were in the pay of a rival street railway company, which would benefit by a conviction.

Four years later, when Clarence Darrow was accused of bribing a juror, it was Rogers he asked to defend him. Even Rogers’ enemies conceded that his defense was brilliant. Adela pictures Darrow sitting morosely in court, Rogers doing his best to pep him up. Long before the trial was over, writes Adela, Darrow was assured of acquittal; but he almost convicted himself by making a two-day speech to the jury. Darrow wept so much that his sleeves looked as if they had been “plunged into a rain barrel.” Obviously piqued that Darrow’s reputation outshines daddy’s, Adela claims that Darrow was guilty and should have gone to jail, though hardly anyone else agrees.

Adela passes quickly over one murder case Rogers lost, but here he was at his best as a lawyer and as a man. He was defending a feeble-minded 17-year-old who had senselessly clubbed another boy to death. There was a public outcry for a hanging, and the boy was duly sentenced to die, but not before Rogers, a lifelong foe of capital punishment, had fought the case to the Supreme Court with tenacity and eloquence. Beneath Rogers’ malarkey, his swagger and his courtroom stunts was a real compassion for the outcasts of the world. “Who are we to take life, life given to this man by whatever power gives life?” he demanded. “To rob him of his chance to repent, to expiate, to throw him straight into hell like a bundle of old rags and bones? ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ the Bible says. Who made us exceptions to this?”