Word: thagard
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...Hayneville, Ala., anything short of outright acquittal had to be considered a surprise. And when Wilkins went on trial again last week, the odds against conviction had not changed. Juries in that very courtroom were remembering their old racist ways. Only last month, before the same Judge T. Werth Thagard who had presided at the first Wilkins trial, Tom Coleman had been acquitted of murdering another civil rights worker, Seminarian Jonathan M. Daniels...
...unpaid, part-time "special deputy," was indicted by a county grand jury for manslaughter, defined in Alabama as killing "intentionally but without malice." State Attorney General Richmond Flowers took over the prosecution, announced that he would seek a new indictment for murder. Last week, before Circuit Judge T. Werth Thagard, Flowers requested a postponement of the manslaughter trial. His main argument: the state's key witness, Morrisroe, was still hospitalized and too ill to testify. Thagard denied a postponement...
Whereupon Thagard ordered the attorney general's office to withdraw from the case, directed two local officials, Circuit Solicitor Arthur Gamble Jr. and County Solicitor Carlton Perdue, to handle the prosecution-even though Alabama law clearly empowers the attorney general "to direct the prosecution of any criminal case in any of the courts of this state...
...William Orville Eaton, 41, are scheduled to go to court on the same charges in the fall. The Wilkins trial was high courtroom drama with a rich cast of characters: the jury, all natives of Alabama except for one man, a transplanted Floridian; Circuit Judge Thomas Werth Thagard, 63, a gently humorous man with a long and respected record of public service; the soft-spoken prosecutor, Circuit Solicitor Arthur E. Gamble Jr., 45; the melodramatic defense attorney, Matt H. Murphy Jr., 51, self-described "Imperial Klonsel" of the Ku Klux Klan; the defendant himself, a bored auto mechanic, potbellied despite...
Remember Judas. Murphy clearly was saving himself for his summation-and it was a remarkable exhibition. For more than an hour, he ranted and raved. His statements at times sounded so utterly divorced from reality that some of the jurymen cast their eyes down and studied their hands. Judge Thagard slumped deeper and deeper into his brown leather chair as if by doing so he might disappear altogether...