COURT IN TEARS

Greymouth Evening Star, 26 January 1929, Page 3

COURT IN TEARS

MAN WHO SHOT SON ACQUITTED

Tears filled the eyes of the jury and welled up in those of the judge, tho prosecutor burst out crying, and the prisoner fainted as a verdict of not guilty in favour of Arthur Falk, tho confessed murderer of his own son was returned at Chicago.

Dickens could not have imagined stranger scenes than those which occurred in the grim old criminal courts building when one of the shortest trials in American history came to an end amid a storm of weeping. The crime was a simple one and went unchallenged. Falk, in a drunken rage, had shot his son Eldred, 22 years old, when the boy upbraided him for returning home so often intoxicated. The father had given his son a shotgun for Christmas. One evening three months ago the lad presented the gun to his father, saying “Shoot me, for 1 would rather be dead than tho son of a drunkard.” Pulling the trigger in his stupor, Falk fired, and his son lay dead at his feet. '

His wife and his 19-year-old daughter Vernus at first turned bitterly against him, but a few days before the trial they declared their intention to stand by him.

Against them in court were Messrs Harold Levy and Emmett Byrne, known throughout Chicago as “the Hanging Prosecutors.”

The defence intimated that they would plead that Falk did not know what he was doing. The State called the daughter, Vernus, as its chief witness.

Relentlessly “the Hanging Prosecutors” forced her to retail the incidents of the tragic evening. Fronting her, his face contorted with remorse and at his elbow the gun that caused the son’s death, sat her father. Behind sat her mother and grandmother, both in the deepest mourning. As the girl identified the weapon that caused her brother’s death, she broke into a passionate fit of weeping, in which she was joined by the crowded court of spectators and by several of the jury.

Other witnesses were quickly disposed of, and Prosecutor Byrne rose to begin the closing argument that would bring the prisoner to the electric chair. Instead, he too burst out crying, and, with tears streaming down his face, said: “If this man is sent to the electric chair or to the penitentiary I refuse to be a party to it. When I had concluded my argument I could not look into the faces of his wife, daughter, or mother.” Now the whole courtroom was bathed in tears, and Judge Normoyle was seen wiping his eyes.

Without further argument the case went to the jury, who brought in a verdict of not guilty in five minutes. “The verdict,” said the judge, “is a very sensible one. It is the only one that could have been returned in the circumstances.

In the judge’s chambers Falk and his family were reunited, still too full of emotion- to speak.