John Scopes. What became known as the Scopes Monkey Trial began as a publicity stunt for the town of Dayton, Tennessee. A local businessman met with the school superintendent and a lawyer to discuss using the ACLU offer to get newspapers to write about the town.
The trial was viewed as an opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of the bill, to publicly advocate for the legitimacy of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and to enhance the profile of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The trial day started with crowds pouring into the courthouse two hours before it was scheduled to begin , filling up the room and causing onlookers to spill into the hallways. There was applause when Bryan entered the court and further when he and Darrow shook hands.
The grand jury met on May 9, 1925. In preparation, Scopes recruited and coached students to testify against him. Three of the seven students attending were called to testify, each showing a sketchy understanding of evolution. The case was pushed forward and a trial set for July 10.
Clarence Darrow – a famous attorney who had recently acted for the defense in the notorious Leopold and Loeb murder trial – found out about the Scopes trial through journalist H.L. Mencken, who suggested Darrow should defend Scopes.
It was to a packed courthouse on Monday that arguments began by the defense working to establish the scientific validity of evolution, while the prosecution focused on the Butler Act as an education standard for Tennessee citizens, citing precedents.
Witnesses followed, establishing that Scopes had taught evolution and zoologist Maynard M. Metcalf gave expert testimony about the science of evolution, a signal that Scopes himself would not take the stand during the trial. Subsequent days saw prosecutors argue about the validity of using expert witnesses.
Hillary Clinton successfully defended an accused child rapist and later laughed about the case.
In 1975, young lawyer Hillary Rodham was appointed to represent a defendant charged with raping a 12-year-old girl. Clinton reluctantly took on the case, which ended with a plea bargain for the defendant, and later chuckled about some aspects of the case when discussing it years later.
In May 2016, the image macro shown above began circulating on Facebook, holding that back in 1975 a young Hillary Clinton (then Hillary Rodham) had “volunteered” to represent a 42-year-old man (Thomas Alfred Taylor) who was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, that Clinton told the judge in the case that the complainant “made up the rape story because [she] enjoyed fantasizing about older men, that Clinton “got [the] rapist freed,” and that Clinton later admitted she knew the defendant was guilty and “laughed about” the outcome of the case.
The trial’s proceedings helped to bring the scientific evidence for evolution into the public sphere while also stoking a national debate over the veracity of evolution that continues to the present day. Scopes Trial.
With Raulston limiting the trial to the single question of whether Scopes had taught evolution, which he admittedly had, Scopes was convicted and fined $100 on July 21.
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. ...
In the autumn of 2018, President Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court dominated news cycles after three women publicly accused him of sexual assault or sexual misconduct during his high school and college years.
When President George W. Bush nominated him to the DC Circuit in 2003, Brett Kavanaugh had never tried a case in court and was promoted from a law clerk to a judgeship.
Kavanaugh himself wrote in 2003 that "I have not been a trial lawyer," and by his own admission had never tried a case from start to finish; rather, he contributed legal analysis and argument as part of a team or with respect to individual components of larger cases.
In 1925, Darrow defended John T. Scopes in the State of Tennessee v. Scopes trial. It has often been called the "Scopes Monkey Trial," a title popularized by author and journalist H.L. Mencken. The trial, which was deliberately staged to bring publicity to the issue at hand, pitted Darrow against William Jennings Bryan in a court case that tested Tennessee's Butler Act, which had been passed on March 21, 1925. The act forbade the teaching of "the Evolution Theory " in any state-funded educational establishment. More broadly, it outlawed in state-funded schools (including universities) the teaching of "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals."
"Attorney for the Damned" (Arthur Weinberg, ed), published by University of Chicago Press in 2012 ; Simon and Schuster in 1957; provides Darrow's most influential summations and includes scene-setting explanations and comprehensive notes; on NYT best seller list 19 weeks.
He took the latter because he had become convinced that the criminal justice system could ruin people's lives if they were not adequately represented.
On September 9, 1925, a white mob in Detroit attempted to drive a black family out of the home they had purchased in a white neighborhood. During the struggle, a white man was killed, and the eleven black men in the house were later arrested and charged with murder. Ossian Sweet, a doctor, and three members of his family were brought to trial, and after an initial deadlock, Darrow argued to the all-white jury: "I insist that there is nothing but prejudice in this case; that if it was reversed and eleven white men had shot and killed a black man while protecting their home and their lives against a mob of blacks, nobody would have dreamed of having them indicted. They would have been given medals instead...."
Early life. Clarence Darrow was born in the small town of Farmdale, Ohio, on April 18, 1857, the fifth son of Amirus and Emily Darrow (née Eddy), but grew up in nearby Kinsman, Ohio. Both the Darrow and Eddy families had deep roots in colonial New England, and several of Darrow's ancestors served in the American Revolution.
Darrow married Jessie Ohl in April 1880. They had one child, Paul Edward Darrow, in 1883. They were divorced in 1897. Darrow later married Ruby Hammerstrom, a journalist 16 years his junior, in 1903. They had no children.
The Scopes Trial and the Sweet trial were the last big cases that Darrow took on before he retired from full-time practice at the age of 68. He still took on a few cases such as the 1932 Massie Trial in Hawaii.
A $10 million libel lawsuit filed by the owners of One America News Network against MSNBC's top star, Rachel Maddow, was dismissed in May when the judge ruled she had stretched the established facts allowably: "The context of Maddow's statement shows reasonable viewers would consider the contested statement to be opinion.".
Tucker Carlson appears to be made of Teflon. Fox News' top-rated host has been repeatedly accused of anti-immigrant and racist comments, which have cost his political opinion show many of its major advertisers. Yet Carlson endures in his prime-time slot.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson "is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary,' " U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil wrote. Fox News host Tucker Carlson "is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' ...