The Trial of Lizzie Borden(79)
The Fall River Daily Evening News declared: It was an “acute and adroit unmasking of the weakness of the case of the prosecution. One by one his sledge hammer seemed to knock the props out from under the case for the prosecution till it hardly seemed as though the state’s attorneys had a leg left to stand upon.” The Boston Post concluded: “As an appeal to the common sense the speech is a mastery.” Another reporter explained: “Robinson indulged in no flights, but in a matter of fact way talked to the hardheaded, cool old farmers in the jury.” Robinson’s simplicity and clarity had already won him “universal admiration.” “The argument,” another noted, “was worthy of the occasion and of the man.”
The New York correspondents were less impressed. Robinson may have been a peerless cross-examiner, an unrivaled “seducer into unwitting admissions,” but, in Howard’s estimation, his closing argument “fell short of the anticipation in both matter and manner.” Ralph went further: “It never reached up to eloquence and it never reached into the heart of the hearer.” “Worse yet,” he continued, “it was conceived in the wrong spirit . . . There was never a note of triumph in four hours of talking, nor was there one bold declaration of the woman’s innocence. Instead of adopting this manner, Mr. Robinson took the defensive.”
District Attorney Knowlton for the government, Boston Globe
When Hosea Knowlton rose to give his closing argument, he knew he faced a formidable challenge. Knowlton had lost the two most important rulings on evidence, rulings excluding Lizzie’s inquest testimony and her alleged attempts to buy prussic acid. He now stood before a jury that had just heard Robinson’s summation, a summation that was as much sentimental narrative as legal argument. And it was so hot in the courtroom that “the crowd inside was one vast fan.” But, as Howard put it, “[h]is strong personality, his firm New England temperament, his devotion to duty, but above all his matchless skill in forcible statement, his incisive and logical mind combined with his long experience in prosecuting legal offenders were all at his command.”
Knowlton immediately acknowledged the special horror of the crimes: “In the midst of the largest city of this County, in the midst of his household, surrounded by houses and people and teams and civilization in the midst of the day . . . an aged man and an aged woman are suddenly and brutally assassinated. It was a terrible crime. It was an impossible crime. But it was committed.” The sense of “impossibility” did not end with the crime. If anything, the identity of the accused increased it. “If you had read the account of these cold and heartless facts in any tale of fiction,” Knowlton admitted, “you would have said . . . That will do for a story, but such things never happen.” Knowlton acknowledged: “It is no ordinary criminal that we are trying today. It is one of the rank of lady, the equal of your wife and mine . . . of whom such things have never been suspected or dreamed before.” This fact, above all others, gave the case its “terrible significance.” He explained: “We are trying a crime that would have been deemed impossible but for the fact that it was, and are charging with the commission of it a woman whom we could have believed incapable of doing it but for the evidence that it is my duty, my painful duty, to call to your attention.”
Before specifically linking Lizzie Borden to the crimes, Knowlton provided well-known examples of unlikely criminals. First, Knowlton argued that “no station in life is a pledge or security against the commission of crime.” Knowlton described ostensibly respectable gentlemen who absconded with funds, particularly those of widows and orphans. For example, in a notorious episode from the 1870s, two socially prominent Fall River businessmen were tried for embezzling bank funds. Knowlton explained: “They were Christian men, they were devout men.” Yet, he added, “When the crash came it was found they were rotten to the core.” Second, he argued even the “sacred robes of the church are not exempt,” for even ministers “have found themselves to be foul as hell inside.” Knowlton was referring to the Reverend Ephraim Avery, a Methodist minister tried for the 1832 murder of pregnant factory worker Sarah Cornell, once Fall River’s most notorious killing. Third, he argued that youth was no protection against crime, citing the case of Jesse Pomeroy, “a boy of tender years” who was “the most fiendish murderer that the Commonwealth ever knew.” Finally, he asked the most important question: “Is sex a protection of crime?” Knowlton reminded the jury of a notorious murder case “within the remembrance of every man I am talking to,” involving a woman known as “the Borgia of Somerville.” Sarah Jane Robinson’s well-insured family died with a suspicious regularity; she was convicted of one poisoning (and suspected of six others) in 1888.
Although he implied that he had intended to theorize a criminal lady, he had not. Instead he separated out the four most disturbing factors—class, religion, youth, and sex—from Lizzie’s identity to argue that none of them was, in and of itself, a barrier to criminal behavior. He could easily have ignored youth. But instead of pointing out that Lizzie Borden was, after all, an adult of thirty-two years, Knowlton colluded in the defense’s presentation of Borden as a young girl. It seemed that Knowlton could not see past her designated minority as an unmarried daughter living in her father’s house. The other factors were even more difficult to dismiss. Class, religion, and sex together formed a potent cocktail. Knowlton’s only example of a female murderer was not of Borden’s class, nor was she a member of the Christian Endeavor Society. She had also used poison, the quintessential tool of the female murderer.