MURDERED MAN’S EFFIGY

Evening Star, Issue 20310, 19 October 1929, Page 19

MURDERED MAN’S EFFIGY

PRODUCTION DURING TRIAL IN AMERICAN COURT A piaster of Paris effigy of a murdered man was a sensational feature of the trial of sixteen Communists ami strikers at Charlotte, North Carolina, on a charge of murdering the Chief ol Police, Mr Aderholt, of Gastonia. The packed courtroom was thrown into disorder as the deputy-sheriffs brought in a full-sized model of Mr Aderholt, wrapped in a black shroud, and placed, it on the prosecutor’s table. When the solicitor, Mr Carpenter, solemnly stepped forward, removed the covering and revealed a figure dressed in Mr Aderholt’s uniform, there was uproar, which was drowned by the hammering of the judge’s gavel and shouts of protest from the attorneys for the defence. Facing the figure sat the weeping lorms of the policeman’s widow and daughter. After a. semblance qf order had been restored Judge Barnhill sternly ordered the prosecutor to remove the effigy, and when Mr Carpenter hesitated **« shouted: “Get that thing out of here immediately.” FORTY-ONE GUN WOUNDS. Four State witnesses, according to the New York correspondent of the ‘ DailyTelegraph, ’ told of the events which led up to the shooting outside the Union Headquarters at Gastonia on June «. Two Communist leaders, Freedbeal and Vtrabuch, are alleged to have urged the strikers to shoot the policemen when they sought to disperse the mob, bnt there was no evidence as to which prisoner fired the fatal shot. The jphysician attending Mr Aderholt said he found forty-one gun wounds in the dead man’s back. Tho cross-examination attempted U» pi ore that the policemen were drunk, and that the strikers fired in , selfdefence. The judge tried his utmost to restrict the evidence to the events leading to the actual killing, and resolutely opposed the efforts of the defence to seek a trial on the wider issue of Capitalism versus Labour in_ relation to strikes in the southern textile milh. NEW TRIAL ORDERED. A Reuter message stales that Lie trial, which aroused passion and prejudice almost equal to that in the SaccoVanzctti case, ended suddenly, owing to a juror becoming insane. The judge pronounced a mis-trial of the accused, and a new trial has been fixed for October 30. Tho trouble began when trade unionists from the north came to organise the workers for tiie fight. It is alleged that terrible conditions prevailed in the southern mills, and that the shooting occurred when the police were dispersing a crowd outside the trade union headquarters at Gastonia on June 7.