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Show I ONE mUWW MURTOI??- I When an Ohio jury declared Charles Brown not guilt' it closed the one hundred and third murder trial In which one attorney has j engaged either as prosecutor or B counsel for the defense. The Brown j case was another victory for the I man who in the past forty years has been appearing daily in the courts of eastern Ohio and western Penn-, Penn-, sylvania. So often has this attorney faced judge and jury in criminal cases, so successfully has he approached them with argument or plea, that in the big steel making country it has I become instinct with the man ar rested for any crime to send for I him. So well is his work on a mur der trial done that prosecutors Bend for him to assist them in big cases By answering those calls has he I found himself, at times, on the attacking at-tacking side of the courtroom. ! "But I don't like to prosecute," he says. ' Try as I will, it gets on . my nerves to sit every day through a trial looking at the man I'm work-ing work-ing to help hang or electrocute. A number of years ago I was over in Green county, Pennsylvania, help- II mg prosecute four men charged j with killing a fellow by beating him up Well, we got two of them I hanged, so we might be said to have done our work well. But I'll never forget how Zach Taylor, one of the convicted pair, used to rise from his J chair every morning as I passed him J on my way across the courtroom .1 and say, 'Good morning." He always j smiled and bowed and was entirely . 1 courteous and, I believe, sincere. 1 That trial lasted more than two I J weeks, and I want to say that seeing I 1 that man go through his performance perform-ance every day made it hard for me I 1 to continue prosecuting i "But the prosecutor always has it ."j a little easier than the man who is . : defending, lor when you go into I I court to defend a man against a .' j! murder charge you feel that a hu- ;V ''j man life is dependent on you No H H matter how hard you may try to de- I tach yourself trom the case that idea I stays with you, and you find your- t&'i I self wearing down under the burden B-ij, of responsibility." j And here is a man whose appcar- R"".J ance confirms bis sunls. His bold. ja3ro upstanding, rugged frame has bc-gun bc-gun to show in a slight degree the &t'5 v. ear aud (ear of the past forty jBj$4i 3 -ars. Vet this lawyer is not old. Klii J,e uno would think him so because fpyfrj lie haa practiced atnee 1870 would M3 change his mind at the first Bight of jfflftfi him as he stands in the door of his PM office looking over the waiting SggEra, ' llents in the outer room. There HHBB, are vijjor and power in ike breadth of shoulders and the depth of chest which have remained with this man despite his years over the books. On his face. too. are left some traces of the days in court Deep lines around the eyes, heavy furrows around the mouth, are there, but they do not look like the signs of age. They are rather the marks of habit in a face accustomed to the uses of a man who pleads before juries, a man who, they who have watched him say, could have been a tragedian of note had he turned his attention to the stage rather than the courtroom. It is the face of an actor of what we have learned to call the old school, a school which came to end with the practice of facial massage in every barber shop to iron out the wrinkles of the hard working man. It is a face without artificiality, a face eminently kind, yet lacking nothing, in keeness. It would be unfair to call it shrewd, for it has none of the undesirable qualities of shrewdness It is above all things intelligent and simple, and in its frame of iron gray hair, with its drooping mustache and heavy eyebrows, eye-brows, it has an air of great kindliness kindli-ness Simplicity appears to be the dominant dom-inant note in this man s habit of life. His manner is simple, his clothes are simple and worn without evidence evi-dence of having taken much of his thought. His office is simple. The office he has occupied for years is good enough for him. he delights in its simplicity and the people who go to see him find in the place a charming lack of formality, formal-ity, a pervading air of democracy that is reassuring. It is an old residence res-idence whose yellow paint is streaked streak-ed with smoke from locomotives tlrut pass under its eaves. Its high stone steps are worn by the feet of many callers and broken by the settling of foundations. Its waiting room, opening off the hall at the front of the house, is innocent in-nocent of rug, but is made altogether altogeth-er cheery by a coal fire in the grate. There are chairs, a number of them, but not enough to accommodate all those who would see the man in the rear room. Late comers perch on the edge of a flat-topped desk or lean patiently against the wall. There is in this office no frill 1n the person of an office boy. From time to time the door of the rear room opens, a caller comes out from his audience, and in the doorway stands the attorney himself. He glances around the outer room, crosses It to greet any newcomers and inquires Into their business, then takes with him the one ho will see next. The door closes behind them after revealing that in the inner room there Is a green rug and hinting that there may bo other bits of decoration. But the Inner office Is no more ornate than the outer, whose chi ( objects of art are a lithograph' d calendar and a photograph of a football foot-ball team of the days when the players play-ers wore skin-tight garments and heavy mustaches In his inner room the criminal lawyer tilts back his wide black hat, turns his back to his modest roll top desk and puts his feet on a table. That's the comfortable com-fortable position he assumes to ease the pain of submitting to an interview. in-terview. When a client is in the room he is a bit less informal but no less easy. Barely beyond reach of a man who sits in the attorney s chair locomotives lo-comotives play tag. trotting back and forth along the rails as they throw cars into that switch and pull them out of this As they puff and strain at their loads outside the lawyer's window it would seem that tbej might drown his voice But not his. Years of practice have taught him to what pilch his voice must be raibed to compete with one online, to what pitch to compete with two, and to the proper pitch he sends it. apparently without consciousness con-sciousness that he is being disturbed disturb-ed That the railroad runs through his office is a fact he loug ago accepted, ac-cepted, and his clients must be prepared pre-pared to accept It, for he will have none of the newer frills put on by some in his profession. However, the office in which this lawyer does business is of little concern con-cern to the man being tried for murder. mur-der. Most of the prisoners on that charge haven't influence enough to be allowed bail, so tbey meet their lawyers In their cells Consequently, Consequent-ly, this lawyer knows his way around half the jails in Ihe district in which he practices. His first murder case was tried in 1S74. He was called to defend a man of aboui 'Ju. w ho, on a morning, had come downstairs apparently in good spirits, but took offense at the fact that his father-in-law was using his hatchet. Thereupon he seized the hatchet and in a minute had killed his two small daughters. The defense, of course was Insanity. The accused was discharged from the charge of murder and eventually sent to a hospital for the insane. It was the begiuning of this attorney's attor-ney's rise. Soon after he had fall into his hands a case that became famous and thai brought to the young lawyer law-yer many honors of the courtroom. A girl was murdered on the. edge of the town. Her body was found in a thicket, and the same day there, was arrested a tramp who had been seen that morning on the road near the spot where the crime was committed com-mitted This lawyer was assigned to defend him and found himself loaded with a task which promised little in the way of sin cess. From the beginniug this tramp insisted in-sisted that he was innocent Hut there was no use. His trial was brief, and though the evidence was wholly circumstantial It was of such a nature that the jury did not hesitate to find the man guilty He was sentenced to be hanged, and his was the only hanging in the history of this county hen the tramp told his story to this lawyer he gave a Canadian town as his address and said his parents aud sisters were living there. The attorney wired to the prisoner's father fa-ther just before the trial opeucd and received ai once a reply, saying that the father was on the way. The trial was put over for a day, but the next morning there came a message from Buffalo reading "Taken suddenly ill. Must stay-here. stay-here. Do the best you can for my boy." One morning when the (ramp was waiting for the celebration of hangman's hang-man's day, the sheriff came to the attorney's office, saying: "Come over to the jail. There's a woman there who says she s Charley's mother, but he refust s to see her." The attorney went and saw the w oman. "I knew as soon as I saw her,' he says, "that she was the boy's mother Never saw a closer family resemblance So I went back and saw Charley and asked him why he wouldn't see the old lady. " 'She a not my mother.' he said 'My mother's not alive. I lied to you, when I told you I came from that Canadian town. My parents are dead.' "But I told him 1 was going to take the woman in to see him. and I did it Before we got there he had turned out the gas light in his cell and thrown himself on his cot with his face? to the wall. His features fea-tures couldn't be made out from the corridor. "The woman walked up to the cell door and spoke to him. ."'Charley.' she said 'Charley I'm your mother "The boy raised his head and rested rest-ed it on his hand " 'Madam, you are mistaken." he said. 'I'm not your son." " 0. yea you are. Charley. You needn t" think your old mother doesn't know you. Come and kiss me as you used to do.: " 'No, madam. You are mistaken. ) T lied hen I said I was from that Canadian tow n I Knew your son in Cloveland when I was working there. I roomed with him and as he talked to me about his home I was able to tell the story I did. And I took his name to protect my own. "That woman went away entirely unconvinced She believed the boy-was boy-was ber son. And he was. He admitted ad-mitted it afterward and said lie lied to her so that she would take the word home to his sisters. He hoped they at least would believe he was not their brother." In connection with the prosecutions prosecu-tions following the Homestead riots this attorney came into national prominence as one of counsel for defense Before the trials were over his name was known the coun'ry over, and since their conclusion he has If en called more and more into western Pennsylvania cases On one of i hose occasions he assisted in the defense of a man charged with the commission of a murder twenty-two years previously This was the case of Jake Siopt. a mountaineer, who twice had he. n convicted of killing a neighbor in a quarrel over a dog After the appeal was taken from the second of these trials Stopt escaped aud went down Into West Virginia. Everj the years he made a pilgrimage pilgrim-age to his home in the Pennsylvania hills Finally the authorities learned learn-ed of this and on oue of his trips captured him. Stopt was brought to trial in Uniofttown for the third time nearly a quarter of a century after the killing kill-ing of his neighbor. In ihe meantime mean-time death had removed most of the actors in the original trial. The trial judge, the prosecutor, counsel for the defense, nearly all the Jurors Jur-ors and most of the witnesses at the first trial were gone. Stopt's daughter, who as a child had been a witness on the first occasion, came into court on the last, with her own babe in arms There were about the trial some elements of romance, muny of mystery, and before it was ended the attorney found himself many times involved in the tangled ends of broken threads of evidence. But in the end the mountaineer was cleared. One more case In Pennsylvania A well-to-do, middle-aged German was killed just after he had blown the evening whistle that called his night relief in the engine house of a steel mill With the routine of his day's work done the man had sat down with his back to a window A moment later a bullet went through his head It had been fired at such close range that his hair was burned and wadding from the cartridge was blown into the wound. Detectives could not learn that anyone any-one had been seen in the vicinity of the engine house, but presently they found that the man's wife had been taking out insurance on his life. She had policies amounting to $18,000 Tbey arrested ber and she called the Ohio attorney to defend her "The general public has a mistaken mistak-en idea concerning the work of the criminal lawyer," says this lawyer. "Most people Bccm to believe that the prisoner tells his lawyer the truth, that if he's guilty he says so at the beginning and the lawyer goes to work to fabricate a defense, it Now- that's wrong. Nineteen times out of twenty the man says he's innocent in-nocent whether he is or not and the story he tells on the witness stand, if be gets there, is the story' he tells his lawyer in their first interview " The woman w ho had insured her husband's life was now the twentieth twen-tieth client. She swore that she was innocent, and he went into the court room prepared with that statement as his basis The irial had gone two days when the woman sent for him He didn't care to see her. but she insisted until he went. In her quarters in the Jail she confessed that she had shot her husband. That was all he would allow her to say. He went into court again scarcely' knowing what to do, but waiting for something to turn up. Presently the prosecution called as a witness a woman the attorney had seen in the jail. WiLhin the walls she had posed as a prisoner, but when he saw her approaching the witness stand his suspicions that She was a detective were confirmed. She was asked where she was at the time he remembered as the hour at which he had heard his client's confession The question was the signal for an objection by counsel for the defense While the trial baited he took the prosecutor aside and learned from him that the detective was to tell of the prisoner's coufessiou " hat about the professional ethics eth-ics of that,,: the attorney asked. "Don't you remember that the confidences confi-dences of a lawyer and his client are sacred?" "Yes, I know It looks rather bad to put on this woman, but the people are all worked up over this case, and if they ever found out I bad the goods on this woman and didn't convict con-vict her it would kill me." "Yes," said the attorney, "it would. You go ahead and put in your evidence. evi-dence. Ill withdraw my objections." objec-tions." So the detective went on the stand and told her story of the woman's wom-an's confession, a bare enough narrative nar-rative if she had stuck to the truth, but embellished, as she told it. with a wealth of circumstantial detail as to how the shooting was done Then court adjourned for the night. "George," said the attorney to the prosecutor, "you've got me. That woman lied fluently, but she's strong on the only point of fact she made, so strong that I couldn't break her down. I'm not going to make anv attempt. I'll rest our case in the morning But, George, one other thing I don't like to have to do it but I think I'll have to go to the jury pretty strong about you and the methods you used to get that evidence evi-dence I say I don't like to do it. and I hope you will forget it as soon as the case Is ended. My only feat-is feat-is that other people won't forget what 1 may have to say ' "I knpw it's going to sound rather rough." said the prosecutor "I wonder if we couldui make a deal " "That was just what I wanted " lie says "We got together and without sending the case to the jury managed manag-ed to get the woman out with cicht years. b "She was a coot one. She had bought the pistol after the insurance insur-ance was taken out. and for months awaited her opportunity. All that Ipl . IS! time ahe kpt the pistol undr the mat tress on which her husband slept. She studied his habits until she learned that he frequently sat down with bis back to the engine houso window. On the afternoon of ihe murder she dressed in a suit of his clothes put on a false mustache, and waited among the freight cars bl hind the engine house until ii was I dusk and she had her chance. "Then she wenl home, pur on her own clothes and got supper When the potatoes began to get cold she ran over to her daughter's house and said, 'I m worried about your father. It's away past his time- for getting home and I haven't beard auvthing of him ' That started ihe story that ended with her going to the pen." r |