THE HAUPTMANN TRIAL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22498, 16 February 1935, Page 12

THE HAUPTMANN TRIAL

It really looks as if the end of the Lindbergh case were in sight. Just on three years after the episode of the' kidnapping of the infant son of Colonel Lindbergh from his home in New Jersey, a German carpenter, by name Bruno Richard Hauptmann, thirty-five years of age, has been found guilty of the murder of the child and has been sentenced to death by electrocution. The ways of justice are devious in the United States, and, according to British standards, are peculiar. It may be that the tracking down of Hauptmann as the man responsible for the abduction and death of the Lindbergh child represented a great achievement on the part of those engaged in a search for the murderer. In the trial which has ended in the conviction of the accused man all the sensationalism in the shape of publicity associated with the event which gave it origin has been revived and magnified. Four hundred newspaper men, apart from a horde of photographers, telegraphists, and radio reporters, took virtual possession of the little town of Flemington in New Jersey, and provision was made for a deluge over the wires working up

to over two million words daily before the ISO scheduled witnesses had been called. While picture-taking was prohibited during the sitting of the court the photographers stood around the walls, according to an early report, waiting for the moment when the recess was called. Film pictures of the wretched Hauptmann, manacled to his gaoler, have been shown on the screen in New Zealand. One American journal had actually the temerity to say: “ The obligation rests on the newspapers, the lawyers, and the mov-ing-picture companies not to profane the temples of justice. Let-the public put upon itself these restraints. Let us be civilised and not make judicial processes a barbaric spectacle.” But the American public enjoys sensationalism. Cabled reports containing excerpts from the evidence given at the trial have been furnished to New Zealand readers, inviting the comment that some of this evidence, which was presumably accepted, was certainly not of a kind that would have been admitted in a British court of justice. Hauptmann was found guilty by a jury which included four women and deliberated upon its verdict for over eleven hours. On the assumption that he is guilty, his plight can'excite no sympathy other than in the respect in which he was made, the central figure in sensation-mongering publicity. It may be expected that he will pay the extreme peftalty in due course, as decreed, unless he should have resources behind him such as may serve in the manner so frequently illustrated in the United States to retard or stay indefinitely the process of justice.