Word: courtroom
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Grisly Package. Belli's most noteworthy contribution to tort-trials is in his use of "demonstrative evidence," i.e., visual aids. He will take his skeleton, named "Elmer," into the courtroom and show the jury by experts' testimony exactly where plaintiff broke a bone, then stalk to his portable blackboard to draw diagrams of the accident scene. Often he chalks figures to justify the damages he is demanding-so much per hour for pain, so much for medical bills, so much in lost wages, etc., etc.-occasionally makes a deliberate mistake in addition, so as to let an alert...
Lawyer Belli's methods sometimes exceed traditional limits. In one celebrated case, in which he acted for a woman who had lost one leg, Belli brought a grotesque, leg-shaped package into the courtroom. It was wrapped in butcher's paper, tied with twine. Throughout the trial, the jury stared in horrified fascination at the package. Finally, near the end of the trial, Showman Belli slowly and deliberately opened the package-and handed the contents to a startled juror. It was an artificial leg, of the sort the plaintiff would have to wear for the rest...
...after a parade of helpful Negroes and hostile whites into the paneled appeals courtroom on the fourth floor of Montgomery's Federal Building last week, even Southern members seemed discomfited by the reach and callousness of Alabama's discrimination. Said Commissioner John S. Battle, onetime (1950-54) Governor of Virginia and a leading advocate of segregation in public schools: "I fear the officials of Alabama and certain counties made an error in doing that which appears to be an attempt to cover up their actions . . . Punitive legislation may be passed which will be disastrous...
...lawyers and reporters alike walk on tiptoe in the presence of Fulton County Superior Court Judge Durwood T. Pye, a terrible-tempered, robe-twitching jurist whose boiling point is the lowest on the Atlanta bench. Pye once ordered the wholesale arrest of noisy loungers in a corridor outside his courtroom, had to reverse himself when it developed that the loudest noisemaker was a fellow judge, telling jokes at the Coke machine. Last week, mustering a group courage, the Georgia press loudly complained that the autocratic judge had gone...
...case in point was a crusty Pye ruling that prohibited news photographs and sound recordings not only in his courtroom and courthouse but on "adjacent sidewalks and public streets." Pye issued the order the day that State Revenue Commissioner T. V. Williams, charged with larceny after trust, came up for trial. Atlanta papers carefully obeyed the Pye mandate, snapped no new pictures of Defendant Williams, although the Constitution got a picture of him out of its files and ran it on Page One for four days in a row while the hearing was in progress...