Word: belli
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Ruby trial was finally over, and Judge Joe B. Brown was relaxed and loquacious. Between puffs on his pipe, he allowed that Defense Counsel Melvin Belli was "a fine man" and "one of the most brilliant attorneys that's ever appeared in my court." Those were just about the only kind words that anyone could find to say last week about the King of Torts...
...vehemence, the anti-Belli criticism could scarcely match the violence of Belli's reaction to the verdict. As TV cameramen clustered around, Belli burst into a ranting tirade. He called the trial "the biggest kangaroo-court disgrace in the history of American law," charged that Judge Brown had made "some 30 errors," denounced Dallas as "a city of shame." He said that the jury, the selection of which had taken a full two weeks, had been "jammed down our throats." He would "stop practicing law," he said, "if we don't reverse this and make the people...
Coast-to-Coast Shock. The reaction was immediate. In a speech to the American College of Trial Lawyers in Miami Beach, A.C.T.L. President Whitney North Seymour said that Belli's conduct "shocked all of us." Belli's denunciation of the judge and jury on TV, said Seymour, "cannot be allowed to pass by those responsible for maintaining the image of the American lawyer at home and abroad...
Then, into the morning hours, came the summations-four for the prosecution, three for the defense. Belli began the defense's final oration shortly before midnight, walked slowly to the jury box and said softly: "Let us see in the small hours of the morning if we can discover something never lost in this great city of Dallas. I speak of justice." He reviewed the psychiatric evidence, thumped a green cardboard box containing the stack of charts tracing Ruby's brain wave. At the defense table, big Joe Tonahill wept. Jack Ruby, chalk-white, sat listless and still...
...Defense Attorney Melvin Belli who needed the expert witnesses, for Belli based his case on the argument that Jack Ruby was insane when he shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Belli produced a clutch of top psychologists and psychiatrists, all of whom testified that they had found something mentally or emotionally wrong with the defendant. The prosecution brought in its own squad of equally expert professionals, who testified to the contrary. Rebuttal was met with counterrebuttal and the witnesses were cross-examined till they were crosseyed. At the last minute, Belli put in a rush call to Chicago, persuaded Neurologist Frederic...