Evening Post. MONDAY, JANUARY 16, 1928. THE SNYDER CASE

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 12, 16 January 1928, Page 8

Evening Post. MONDAY, JANUARY 16, 1928. THE SNYDER CASE

When the long-drawn-out agony^of the Sacco-Vanzetti case was nearing its terrible climax, its priority as a front-page subject for American readers was successfully challenged for a month or two by another trial which attracted little attention outside the country. In its essentials the Snyder case merely repeated the normal features of that "eternal triangle" which is equally familiar in fiction and in real life. Ruth Snyder, who lived with her husband in a New York suburb, had nothing against him except that she regarded him as dull and found the attentions of Henry Judd Gray more attractive. Though Snyder was very blind* it was soon deemed desirable to get him out of the way, one of the special reasons being that his life was insured for 50,000 dollars, which his wife was innocent enough to believe would be doubled if he died by violence. After she had made several futile attempts to do the deed singlehanded, she called upon Gray to help her, and together they succeeded. As to the guilt of both of them there was never the slightest doubt. It was perfectly well known to the newspapers from the start, and the privileges of a country in which contempt of Court does not count enabled them as the trial proceeded from day to day to point out how this item or that in the evidence had confirmed their verdict or failed to shake it. But even for minds that had not been made up only one conclusion was possible. As both the prisoners had confessed immediately after their arrest, outsiders-may wonder why the trial should have lasted for weeks. It may safely be said that the time spent by the Ne.w York Court in selecting a single juror would have more than sufficed an English Court for the dispatch of the whole case. Of the 400 citizens who had been summoned it took die Court two days to dispose of the challenges to the first eightysix called, and by that time one juror had been empanelled. The ground of one of the successful challenges was that the man in question had once attended a public dinner at which a speech had been made by one of the defending counsel! In regard, however, to the confessions it must be admitted that a British jury would have hesitated, and a British Judge would have had something very plain to say. The confessions of both murderers were obtained by "the customary police plan of informing one that the other had told." Being limited by the law of the State to an exposition of the legal points involved, Judge Scudder was presumably debarred from touching this matter, and it is only fair to say that whatever he was free to do he appears to have done with impartiality, dignity, and restraint. Apart from a general appeal to sentiment and other irrelevancies, the discrepancies between the two confessions appear to have been the points most strongly relied on by counsel for the defence. In the conflict thus arising between the accused Mrs. Snyder had the initial advantage in the normal weakness of an American jury for a woman prisoner, but she appears to have discounted it heavily by the confident and defiant manner in which she relied on it. Gray, on the other hand, had to play the invidious part of a sort of henpecked paramour, goaded into crime by a woman's stronger will of seeking to save himself at her expense. But he impressed the Court as a truthful witness, and the pendulum of sentiment had swung in his favour before the trial closed. By the time the unfortunate man had been more than two days in the box, not merely every detail of the preparation and perpetration of the crime but of a thousand other irrelevant things had, been revealed. His accomplice was treated in much the same way. The accused, we are told, were questioned about everything: their early years, family concerns, their personal affections, business, places of residence, church affiliations, what not. The exclusion of all these irrelevancies was apparently beyond the Judge's power. The still more outrageous improprieties of the newspapers were also beyond his control. They commissioned, says a correspondent of the "New Statesman," almost every high priced descriptive writer who could bo secured. The Hearst Press engaged the most notorious of vice-crusading fundamentalist preachers —Dr. J. E. Straton. Other journals employed novelists, dramatists, or popular psychologists. The "sob sisters" of the evening papers, wore all out. ■ They let themselves go on Eutb Suyder's looks and ways—her blonde hair, her dress, her tears, her alleged charm, her preferences in jurymen. One of them made play with such marvellous discoveries as that her favourite novel was "Vanity Fair," and that the three highest names in her pantheon were Jesus Christ, Lincoln, and Emerson. Tho evening journals and the incredible tabloids (daily picture papers) told everything many times over. It was a quite usual occurrence for the same scene on any day in Court to be written up by four or fivo excited "feature" artists. In tho United States, moreover, there is virtually no such thing as contempt of Court. The Judgo may forbid tho camera, but tho tabloids go as they please, and fake photographs without the smallest scruple. Verbatim reports extending to over two or three pages of small type arc mentioned by the same correspondent as provided by the daily papers,

and ho also notes lhat "the sober 'New York Times' devoted to the proceedings of this case more pages lhan any one of its rivals was able to spare." Irrelevancies, whether favourable or unfavourable to the accused, are, however; normal features of American trials. What must surely make the case unique is the minute detail with which the preparations, the crime itself, and the attempts to cover it up were described by both prisoners. Nothing from the provision of ''a set of cinema properties, complete according to the standards of Hollywood—a window-sash weight, a piece of picture wire for strangling, cotton waste for plugging, a bottle of chloroform" to the invention of a burglary-murder and an alibi was omitted. If in the circumstances it may seem easy for the jury to have done its duty, one must remember that even after verdict and sentence American administration offers immense opportunities for delay and escape. Mrs. Snyder's chances were improved by the fact that no woman had been executed in the State of New York for nineteen years. . Yet on Saturday we were told that "after every legal effort almost to the last hours had failed to secure a stay of proceedings," both sentences have been carried out. The operation of the Baumes laws which were passed in 1926 to simplify and expedite criminal procedure in the State may have something to do with this. The firmness of Governor "Al" Smith is doubtless another cause. In little more than six months New York has completed what in the Sacco-Vanzetti case Massachusetts took six years to do.