Word: courtroom
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...clock that morning the four defendants, whom a polyglot jury had convicted of manslaughter instead of second-degree murder, were led into the Honolulu courtroom where they had sat through their three-week trial. Mounting the bench Judge Charles S. Davis pronounced his sentence: "Ten years imprisonment at hard labor."* A smile flickered across Lieut. Massie's face. Mrs. Fortescue almost pranced she was so happy. The two enlisted men were as jaunty as ever. They all knew what was coming...
That was how the jury, 30 minutes out of its box in the Honolulu courtroom, stood on its first ballot. Of the five Americans, three Chinese, a Dane, a German, a Portuguese and a Hawaiian, only a minority were for convicting Lieut. Thomas Hedges Massie, U. S. N., Mrs. Granville Roland Fortescue, his mother-in-law, and Seamen Lord and Jones for the second-degree murder of Joseph Kahahawai Jr. After that, locked in around the long table with Foreman John Stone at its head, the jurors settled down to harangue one another on Hawaii's most sensational case...
Clarence Darrow, in what he said would be his last big case, took more than four hours to plead for acquittal. He swung his long arms, glared, shouted, coaxed, sentimentalized, used all his courtroom tricks before sinking back into his chair an exhausted old man. His argument was that the defendants had been trapped by Fate in a chain of sorrowful circumstances beyond their control...
From her seat in the small stuffy courtroom of Honolulu's Judiciary Building, a once handsome, now haggard New York & Washington society, matron eyed these twelve U. S. citizens as last week they took permanent seats in the jury box. They were the twelve men good & true who would try her, Mrs. Granville Roland Fortescue, for second-degree murder. On the same charge they would also try her son-in-law, Lieut. Thomas Hedges Massie, U. S. Navy, who sat beside her staring at the floor and biting his lips. Likewise they would try Seamen Edward J. Lord...
From another sector of the courtroom the jury was scrutinized by a swart, heavy Hawaiian who wore spectacles and chewed gum. A trolley motorman. he was Joseph Kahahawai. It was his son and namesake whom Mrs. Fortescue, Lieut. Massie and the two sailors were accused of kidnapping last January from the steps of the same courthouse, shooting to death in the Fortescue cottage and then carrying out toward Koko Head, where they were arrested. Father Kahahawai was there to watch U. S. justice done. Near the defendants sat the other figure most involved in the Territory's most sensational...