THE THAW TRIAL.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXII, Issue 8862, 12 July 1907, Page 4

THE THAW TRIAL.

‘ An AmeriKiuTorrcspoudeut writes : —lt is a matter for profound regret - that the jury sitting injjudgment for twelve weeks upon Henry K. Thaw, a young millionaire, of Pittsburg, Penn., on trial lor the murder of Stanford White, of New York, after two days’ deliberation should have come to a disagreement. For three months our newspapers have been fall of the most disgusting details. Even those who did not care to read were compelled to see the six-inch head lines, cuts of White’s crystal room, the nude figure of Evelyn Thaw as an artist’s model. Now the whole mass of the demoralising stuff must be strained over again. Seven members of the jury held Thaw to bo guilty of murder in the first degree, five believed him to be insane. All the essential facts in this case were unusually plain. There were no disputes as to identities, characters, or the deed at issue. But the resources of human ingenuity were applied to legal tactics. Abstruse technical terms by thousands were used or invented for the occasion, and the twelve men were expected to grasp their meaning and inner essence. A crowd of expert alienists battled with each other, and from their controversies and contradictions the jury wore expected to distil the pure truth. The jury knew from the start that a man had been killed by a pistol shot, that the perpetrator of the deed admitted it, and that the laws of the State of New York prescribe a penalty for such an act. But the whole course of the trial led away from the essential facts, and the jury were kept in a whirl of pseude-law, science and sentiment. They were eacli day compelled to gaze upon a senes of maudlin motion pictures, mixed with hysteria, flummery, sensationalism and tangled contradictious. The verdict that they didn’t know is justified by the contents of the witch’s cauldron round which the lawyers, exports and alienists danced their daily medley. Had Thaw been an ordinary Italian murderer, had his purported wife been a chorus girl of some cheap vaudeville show, the young millionaire would have gone the way of the criminal in double quick time. As it is, however, the entire country has had a “brain storm” over him, and those romantically inclined regard him m the light of a hero, and his sensuous, shameless artist’s model a selfsacrificing angel. The State of New York could well afford to shed no tears for the killing of Stanford White or of the electrocution of Harry K. Thaw.