Kelley was nodding. “What else has led you to this diagnosis, Doctor?”
Bowers had a habit of turning to face the jury as he gave his answers; with his air of professorial expertise, this was quite effective. “Well, I can’t actually provide a diagnosis,” he said, “because the defense has denied me access to the defendant.”
Darrow growled, “I object to the witness’s manner. Why doesn’t he face forward in the chair like any other witness? If he’s going to address the jury, he might as well get up and make a speech to them. This is not the impartial attitude that—”
Bowers exploded; perhaps it was an uncontrollable impulse. “Do you mean to insinuate that I am not honest, sir? Well, I resent it!”
Darrow, hunkering over the table like a grizzly bear over a garbage can, grumbled: “Resent it, then.”
“Please continue, Doctor,” Kelley said, playing the voice of reason.
“Lt. Massie and these other three individuals,” Bowers said, “knowing the consequences, took deliberate steps toward self-protection. They acted in a spirit of vengeance characteristic of persons who feel they’ve not obtained justice by legal means. Such individuals measure their acts, and consider the nature of and consequences of those acts. The steps of this plan were securing an automobile, wearing gloves and goggles, carrying guns, taking steps for disposal of the body, and so on.”
Kelley was nodding. “Thank you, Doctor. That’s all.”
Darrow, remaining seated, asked only one question: “Doctor, may I assume you’re being handsomely paid for coming down here and giving your testimony?”
“I expect to be paid,” Bowers said testily.
“That is all.”
Kelley, on his way back to his table, turned and said, “Prosecution rests, Your Honor.”
“Summations begin tomorrow,” Judge Davis said, and banged with his new gavel. “Court is adjourned.”
And the next day summations did begin, but it was the second team up first, with Leisure making the case for the unwritten law (“You gentlemen of the jury must decide whether a man whose wife has been ravished, and who kills the man who did it, must spend his life behind dark prison walls, all because the shock proved too great for his mind”), and Kelley’s tall young assistant Barry Ulrich lashing out against lynch law (“You cannot make Hawaii safe against rape by licensing murder!”).
So it was on the following day, with police radio cars parked in front of the Judiciary Building, machine gun-toting patrolmen posted to stave off rumored native uprisings, in a courtroom strung with wire and microphones to broadcast to the mainland what might be the Great Defender’s last great oratory, the gallery packed even tighter than usual with Admiral Stirling and Walter Dillingham and other luminaries noticeably present, that Clarence Darrow rose from his chair behind the defense table where room had been made for his friend Dr. Porter, his wife Ruby, as well as Thalia Massie, seated holding hands with her husband, and shambled toward the jury. His suit was dark, baggy. His gray hair streamed haphazardly down his forehead. Fans hummed overhead. Palms rustled. Birds called. Traffic coursed by.
“Gentlemen, this case illustrates the working of human destiny more than any other case I’ve handled. It illustrates the effect of sorrow and mishap on human minds and lives, it shows us how weak and powerless human beings are in the hands of relentless powers.”
He stood before the jury box as he spoke, his bony frame planted.
“Eight months ago Mrs. Fortescue was in Washington, well respected. Eight months ago Thomas Massie had worked himself up to the rank of lieutenant in the Navy, respected, courageous, intelligent. Eight months ago his attractive wife was known and respected and admired by the community. Eight months ago Massie and his wife went to a dance, young, happy. Today, they are in a criminal court and you twelve men are asked to send them to prison for life.”
He began to slowly pace before them.
“We contend that for months Lt. Massie’s mind had been affected by grief, sorrow, trouble, day after day, week after week, month after month. What do you think would have happened to any one of you, under the same condition? What if your wife were dragged into the bushes, and raped by four or five men?”
He paused, leaned against the rail of the box. “Thalia Massie was left on that lonely road in pain and agony and suffering. Her husband hears from her bruised lips a story as terrible, as cruel, as any I’ve heard—isn’t that enough to unsettle any man’s mind?”
He turned and walked toward the defense table; stood before Tommie and Thalia and said, “There have been people who have spread around in this community vile slanders. They concocted these strange, slanderous stories, and what effect did they have on this young husband? Going back and forth, nursing his wife, working all day, attending her at night. He lost sleep. He lost hope.”
Darrow turned back to the jury as he gestured with an open hand toward Tommie. “Our insane asylums are filled with men and women who had less cause for insanity than he had!”
He ambled back to them, hands in the pockets of his baggy pants. “In time, five men were indicted for the crime. Tommie was in the courtroom during the trial of the assailants. A strange circumstance indeed that the jury disagreed in that case. I don’t know why, I don’t see why, but the jury did their work and they disagreed. Months passed, and still this case was not retried.”
He again gestured toward the defense table, this time indicating Mrs. Fortescue. “Here is the mother. They wired to her and she came. Poems and rhymes have been written about mothers, but I want to call your attention to something more basic than that: Nature. I don’t care whether it’s a human mother, a mother of beasts or birds of the air, they are all alike. To them there is one all-important thing and that is a child that they carried in their womb.”
Now he gestured with both hands at the stiffly noble Mrs. Fortescue.
“She acted as every mother acts, she felt as your mothers have felt. Everything else is forgotten in the emotion that carries her back to the time..,” and now he motioned to Thalia, “…when this woman was a little baby in her arms whom she bore and she loved.”
The sound of rustling handkerchiefs indicated tears were again flowing among the ladies of the gallery.
Darrow looked from face to face among the jurymen. “Life comes from the devotion of mothers, of husbands, loves of men and women, that’s where life comes from. Without this love, this devotion, the world would be desolate and cold and take its lonely course around the sun alone!” He leaned against the rail again. “This mother took a trip of five thousand miles, over land and sea, to her child. And here she is now, in this courtroom, waiting to go to the penitentiary.”
He rocked back on his heels and his voice rose to a near shout: “Gentlemen, if this husband and this mother and these faithful boys go to the penitentiary, it won’t be the first time that such a structure has been sanctified by its inmates. When people come to your beautiful islands, one of the first places they will wish to see is the prison where the mother and the husband are confined, to marvel at the injustice and cruelty of men and pity the inmates and blame Fate for the persecution and sorrow that has followed this family.”
Now his voice became gentle again as he began to pace before them. “Gentlemen, it was bad enough that the wife was raped. That vile stories circulated, causing great anxiety and agony in this young couple. All this is bad enough. But now you are asked to separate them, to send the husband for the rest of his life to prison.”
His voice began to rise in timbre, gradually, and now he faced the gallery and the members of the press, saying, “There is, somewhere deep in the feelings and instincts of all men, a yearning for justice, an idea of what is right and what is wrong, of what is fair, and this came before the first law was written and will abide before the last law is dead.”