Word: courtroom
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Only a Verdict. When the verdict was ready (the jury was out more than 26 hours), Judy entered the courtroom at Archie's side, her face expressionless and pale, the blue circles under her eyes showing the strain of her trial. Smiling nervously, she turned to him: "I don't know whether I can take it or not." Lawyer Archie was brash and noisy as ever. "Don't worry," he explained with fatherly concern. "It's only a verdict...
White-haired Judge Albert Reeves, 75, mounted the bench, and the crowded courtroom was hushed. "The defendant will rise," intoned the marshal. "What say you, ladies & gentlemen of the jury, as to count one [espionage]?" In a firm voice the foreman replied: "Guilty." And to count two [stealing government documents]? "Guilty." Judy sank back, chin in hands, no longer the "simple little girl in love" that Archie Palmer called her, but the convicted spy with "the agile little Swiss-watch mind," as the prosecution called her-a trusted employee who had used her job in the Department of Justice...
Archie Palmer popped into the act. He wanted the jurors polled one by one; the word "guilty" resounded 24 times through the courtroom. He wanted sentence deferred for a month. Two days earlier, in his 130-minute summation, corny Counsel Palmer had invoked St. Matthew ("Judge not, that ye be not judged"), Omar Khayyam ("The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, moves on"), Abraham Lincoln, the golden rule and George Washington Carver. Now he was abusing Shakespeare: "They've got their pound of flesh," he trumpeted. "Do they want the blood with...
Judge Reeves coolly shut him off. As Judy and Archie left the courtroom they were surrounded by a mob of 500 people, pushing, shoving, yelling. "Let me get a look at the hussy," demanded an old woman. "She ought to get a rope around her neck, that's what! I was a yeomanette in the first World War," said another...
Excited murmuring filled the courtroom. The point was obvious: if the defense could prove that the Hisses did not even have the typewriter when the documents were typed (in the early months of 1938), Hiss's case would look fairly secure. Mrs. Catlett's young son, Mike, recalled that it was an old Woodstock. From under the defense table, Defense Lawyer Edward McLean dramatically dragged a battered machine. Was this it? Mike pecked at a couple of keys and decided that...