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You shall know the truth. I am but the truth shall make you free were were but all the truth the truth the many eyes that look on it. The divers things they see were were the jury is hung. What is the matter with those people. They couldn't agree on a verdict that's all. He's guilty as sure as I'm alive that woman is guilty. She's guilty it's just as plain as the nose on your face rose if that woman is guilty. I don't have a nose on my face. What we are born to inquire after truth it belongs to our greater power to pose as it were were. To every man his due in a series of radio programs about the principles of
justice. To every man his do is produce by radio station WAGA of the University of Wisconsin under a grant from the National Educational Television and Radio Center in cooperation with the National Association of educational broadcasters. Now today's program you shall know the. Truth is the highest thing that man keyed. If all men kept the truth we should have little made for our legal institutions but then if any man possessed the truth the whole truth that would be the undoing of most of our political and social institutions from the freedom of speech to the free public school our institutions are founded in the belief that no man possesses the truth and that all man must therefore pursue it. We are free to pursue the truth pursuing truth we are free. This is a persistent theme in our tradition. This
accounts for much that goes on in our halls of justice and on and on and on. Will this disgusting business never end. When I think what that woman must be costing the state hundreds of thousands of dollars tax dollars rel your money and mine decently earned dollars just squandered. Keep calm and showing this little murderous. Well she may not be a murderous role she says she didn't do it. So said she letting fall a tear or two upon her husband's Cope's and clutching all the while in her pearly little hand. Apparently little legal claims it was self defense while the other man just stood by holding her feather boa. Oh come on Ralph has she got you wrapped around her little finger to her little trigger finger that is. Look rose even if that woman is what you seem to take her for what do you take her for. She does have a right to her day in court hard day in court. She's already had more days in court and she has other had night or not that's an exaggeration. Why do you always have to exaggerate told as many stories just to make a point you blow
everything up. All right so she's had only five hundred and one days in court. It's still a wait it's still an exaggeration too. Well as for that when and not you know like that can clutter up the court for months on and parading her sordid little life before the world and all. And at society's expense. Well I call that an exaggeration or something or other. That's what I call it. The hallowed halls of justice are used it's true for everything a great deal of dirty linen and the cost can be awesome. That's true too but it is also true and should never be forgotten that in the halls of justice free born men and women may be deprived by the state of life or liberty. A nation dedicated to the belief that these are the inalienable rights of every human being and hardly exaggerate its efforts to deprive no one of them even the most lowly or unpopular. All this and the
linen must be aired. It is the judgment of the finest minds of countless generations interpreting the experience of centuries that when the linen is not aired its freedom that becomes Muffy. Accordingly it's the law of our land that no person shall be deprived of life liberty or property without due process of law. That from the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This from the 14 nor shall any state deprive any person of life liberty or property without due process of law due process of law cannot be defined in so many specifics. It is you might say a fluid term for a fluid situation. The flowing on from generation to generation of an evolving law. Nor does it embrace precisely the same elements in the federal courts and the courts of the states. Experimentation as well as evolution has allowed for in our law. But this much is universally required in this
land by Due Process of Law that every person accused of a crime is entitled to a trial in a court and a fair trial it must be. No one may be deprived by the state of life or liberty without opportunity to be heard. Whenever our law sits in judgment even when no criminal act is in question a hearing is the general rule. Daniel Webster said it about as well as it can be said that the law of our land is a law which hears before it can then. If an occasion is much ado about nothing that's what it is. Yes and pearls before swine. All those noble principles all those dignified proceedings all that money poured upon the dregs of humanity. That may be because they object. Purpose is misunderstood. You think wouldn't you that in this day and age we could find a more appropriate way to convict a
criminal. To convict. Is this the purpose of a trial object of a court hearing. Trial is the product of centuries of evolution at its roots a method for convicting. Consider an ancient ancestor of our trials. Whole Truth and Nothing But the truth so help me God I am innocent. The truth will out. Once upon a summer's day and years passed in Saxon England. And.
She's guilty and there's a truth that if she be guilty wife I don't have judges we plead she is no lady. This was the day the. Mother of Edward the Confessor's queen daughter of a French who brought the first contamination here was queen brought to trial accused by Edward her son some honor their mother accused Bishop of Winchester. Seats with fear to spoil the day with a fit of weeping.
Best get on with it. Reminds me of the last. And why shouldn't St. Swithin shot her in heaven and drown us all in t is own church they filed there in the very shadow of all that's holy. Royal bag of wanton woman was a trial by water accused only the Queen Mother and you'd best remember that. Accused by the king is good enough for me. Whitewater won't cast up as innocent that's the principle. Well there was this king's man. Our wives royalty too is but human truly said Right you are enhances the flesh to prove it to the ploughman was a cute little rule that sauce mistress I'll see you rowing I'll fire on you when you'll rue wife beating. That's what he was accused of. What did you say stranger. The ploughman was accused of wife beating whatever maybe most dear to a man's dreams. Certain it is to be followed. Oh they took him and they bound him tight and they threw him into the pond right deep it was and then. Come what happened. Always
stank like a Rocky sank like a bag of grain. Innocent as a lamb he was pure as the water that did receive him so jolly as wife lives on a merry widow who would ever get heritage all his worldly goods. Oh I do like a tail to wag happily at its in its tail it seems what I've wagged the same. Had the man been guilty. But we're not ever thus with wife beating. How so sir. Why you are doomed if you do and doomed if you don't. Didn't you know. The trial of trials were those days. And ordeal. Ordeals were of many varieties have been tried by water to prove herself pure. She had been required to take an oath which befell her. Not even an erupting boil. She would be deemed innocent. She might have been tried by any number of orders but were told put to ordeal by fire. Specifically she would walk barefoot over
nine glowing hot ploughshares. I can think of a better use for the trial begins. Look you read the irons will they burn her. What he's guilty well then both here and here. Deliver her well. The truth be known. Tripp mistress. I think three four five. Seven. Eight. We. Listened to. That. If the object of his trial was conviction a kind of cool occurred that
day the will of the state being thwarted or not thwarted only but given a thorough Leckie the chief of state the king himself the chronicler tells us received as punishment for having brought false accusation of the whipping. Obviously conviction was not the object of trial by ordeal. The object was to determine whether she was innocent or guilty. The object was the truth. It may seem to you that nothing much was determined one way or the other in Emma's trial. Whether she did or didn't do it may appear to you just one of history's more interesting mysteries. But that's because of the kind of mind you have with a modern mind that Anglo-Saxons having minds of a different sort. We're convinced that the truth came out in the Queen's trial divinely revealed truth. The trials of the Middle Ages were as they were because the mind of the age was what it was a mind that looked heavenward for truth
or deals were contrived to give have an opportunity to attest to the truth or falsity of the accusation. The modern mind places its faith in its own capacities to inquire after the truth. A modern trial under our system of jurisprudence is therefore a search for the truth by rational means to tell the truth nothing but truth so help you God. You are doing this to illustrate. Take a trial that occurred in this land of the free. In the 1920s when again the cows went on milk pigs on foot. While the folk were out. Doing. Daddy. I think you put the courthouse windows up so high I can't see inside told Murphy that you Homer.
Why should his daddy where you just go right on back home you hear you go home and you take that sheet off. Now go on. Well once I told you once I told you fifty times that kind of a shindig. Not just you high tail it now I mean get this was a modern trial in a court in a county of one of these United States. Five men were on trial for their lives accused of murder during a race disturbance. A qualified judge was on the bench qualified attorneys for prosecution and defense were present. Twelve good men and true the jury box a bible is available for witnesses to swear upon a 20th century trial the courtroom was jammed with onlookers and in the street outside it all in there. There's not upon you don't you forget it here a mob circled about the courthouse stirring the air with flapping jaw and show what again. You know what just. Give me a. Hail. Mary. You. Don't get it. Take your pick. I can't hold you up much longer Homer.
You've got feet like plow shares. When you stand still my shoulders are about to cave in. All right now tell me how the jury looks to you. I reckon it's all right Daddy. Leastways it's all the right color. White. That is which the defendants were not a circumstance which went unchallenged by counsel for the defense. Nor did the defense counsel request that the trial be delayed. Or moved to another locale in view of the extraneous accompaniment. He didn't request separate trials for his five plants either. And he did not call any witnesses. That's what the man said. Nary a witness for the defense. That's their main Not one witness for the defense. What with one omission under another. The proceedings proceeded with remarkable rapidity. Forty minutes after the trial had begun. You can let me down now Daddy. I'd be proud to do that in Fiji you're gonna cut me. Well what happened.
No jury just laid back their chairs and went out. Everybody else stayed put. Also I reckon it won't take long. JORDAN Well what. Would you think they voted on it and decided them fellers is innocent. What if they were the way the law says we do. Sometimes we do things like you just. Don't have the window home or film what's the matter. I missed. That. From the. Games I reckon. It's going to.
Kill me. Guilty it was. Forty minutes for the hearing. Five minutes for the jury to deliberate. Justice was done or was it. Did it prove anything one way or the other about the guilt or innocence of the defendants. Did the truth come out that day. The state Supreme Court thought it did. The Supreme Court of the United States thought it did not said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on that occasion. If the case is that the whole proceeding is a mask that counsel jury and judge were swept to the fatal end by an irresistible wave of public pressure and that the state courts failed to correct the wrong neither perfection in the machinery for correction nor the possibility that the trial court and counsel sought no
other way of avoiding an immediate outbreak of the mob. Can prevent this court from securing the petitioners their constitutional rights. And the point is this although the truth is the only rightful object of a court's trial under our system of justice conviction may become its object. It may whenever influences which impair or impede human rational faculties are admitted to the courtroom. It may also whenever certain aids to rational faculties are omitted from the courtroom. What to admit what to omit. These questions contain virtually the whole story of the modern trials evolution since trial by ordeal was abandoned. It's a matter of law everywhere in this country that mobs must not be permitted to impair the mind of the court in its pursuit of the truth. Mob dominated trials are unfair
trials impairment of the court's rational faculties may come however from within. As well as from without. I know Justice wore a blindfold when the star blinders on the Jag ball bar court Joe caught me with a jug a Little Brown Jug his Little Brown Jug. Yeah we did see you know there's a law against Little Brown Jug in the state to empty my bin full of vinegar. Vinegar doesn't smell a thing like liquor but I knows that even cops and judges. Maybe it's just a Little Brown Jug I have around as a souvenir. That made my waffle wanted to make a lion look Joe the point not even me that I played on that Jag. Corn wasn't matter whether it was or it wasn't. Point is. That Jed slapped a hundred dollar fine and jail time I could pay. Doesn't tell if they have a right to do it.
Me ham. Wow pal that Judd was caught out like a woman's undershirt you know on the buy ass every time he hooks. Yeah part of the fun. Now I get the last part of the family rot in these old parking Yasser on the line that cup of juice. Not the judge only but also the police were paid out of fines collected for violating the state's prohibition law. There was no other source of pay for their work on this particular kind of case. It happened it happened in a small midwestern village in the twenties and the question was was the pursuit of the truth impaired when the judge had such a direct personal substantial interest in finding the defendant guilty.
The United States Supreme Court thought it was the requirement of Due Process of Law in judicial procedure said Chief Justice Taft is not satisfied by the argument that man of the highest honor and the greatest self-sacrifice. Could carry it on without danger of injustice. Every procedure which would offer a possible temptation to the average man as a judge to forget the burden of proof required to convict the defendant deny the latter. Due Process of Law. A judge in any American court is required by law to have no personal and substantial interest in the outcome of any case over which he presides. Everyone has the right to be tried before an unbiased judge. It's a matter of increasing the chances of getting at the truth by rational means. A similar explanation may be given for virtually all our laws requirements with regard to fairness in a trial or other court hearing. Whatever
impairs human reason is to be omitted. Whatever assists it should be admitting an example of the latter. The law's requirement that a court trial must be public. Well I think it's a disgrace all those hair raising details screaming at us from the front page. Don't they know children read those newspapers and do you know that people are allowed to go there and sit in that courtroom and listen. If I were the judge I'd close up that courtroom as though somebody were sitting in there with a contagious disease quarantine it. That's what I do. You'd be sorry. Whatever do you mean. Well you know that feather boy you're always making so much of that feather boa happens to be a very damning piece of evidence. Yes and that feather boat would be hanging in a dry cleaner's shop right now if you were a judge in this trial. Well I don't. Why there was a dry cleaner who like to spend his day off at the courthouse watching trials. One day he happened in on this trial recognized the woman remembered her feather boa from which he had removed certain blood stains.
And that's the way it happens every so often. Evidence comes to light that might otherwise have been undetected because a trial is public witnesses present themselves who might not have been found. It's also argued that witnesses are less likely to give false testimony when the trial is public. The modern mind believes that the truth will come out only after all the evidence is in. This belief is served by the requirement the trials shall be public. Then too it's of no small importance that the eyes of the public upon the courts keep the officials of those courts on their toes that prosecuting attorney ought to be horsewhipped letting a breast a little floozy get him all goggle eyed and fuzzy headed. Honestly Ralph he isn't even half try trying to do what Rove. Yes this mess cleared up of course. To put that woman out of the sight of decent people. If he'd been trying it all she'd have been locked up months ago. So it is when you come right down to it that justice our kind of justice
comes to rest finally in the lap of the people. Traditionally the people of this land have supported the law which not just when convenient or expedient but in every instance hears before it condemns accusation brought by the state itself must not stand untested. The state is men and men may err. Therefore the law must hear for the purpose of determining the truth. Courtrooms too are manned by humans who may or though the truth may not always be discovered. Innocent people may be convicted guilty ones may go free so long as courts pursue the true freedom itself is protected. This has been our traditional view but how do you judge your judges.
How do you measure the efficiency of your district attorney by the number of convictions shown on the record or by the fairness with which the truth is pursued in your courtrooms. These questions have everything to do with an evolving justice and everything to do with you. Are you going all dolled up in fur and feathers. Where am I going. You know very well this is the day all rolls you aren't going there. I tell you it's a waste a waste of time a waste of gas I don't see how you can say that. Well you didn't Rose I know you did it. I've seen you do it a thousand times I have never once seen you not do it. Never have I seen you stop at that stop sign you shift you don't stop. Pay the fine rose and forget about going to court I'll do no such thing. Maybe I didn't stop but I paused. That's different from busting right through without
looking. I paused. That makes me different from some maniac who go sailing right through there ought to be some distinction on the road. They shouldn't lump somebody like me who pauses and looks together with somebody who rips through like a bat out of rolls. Well should they just tell it to the judge. Go on tell it to the judge. To every man his due is produced by radio station WAGA of the University of Wisconsin under a grant from the National Educational Television and Radio Center and distributed by the National Association of educational broadcasters script by Milburn and Elizabeth Carlson content consultant David film and music by Don vaguely. Production by Carl Schmidt. This is the N.A. E.B. Radio Network.
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Series
Harold Schultz
Contributing Organization
University of Maryland (College Park, Maryland)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/500-js9h8883
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Description
Description
No description available
Date
1958-04-18
Genres
Radio Theater
Topics
Theater
Law Enforcement and Crime
Media type
Sound
Duration
00:30:03
Credits
AAPB Contributor Holdings
University of Maryland
Identifier: 62-17-7 (National Association of Educational Broadcasters)
Format: 1/4 inch audio tape
Duration: 00:30:00?
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Citations
Chicago: “Harold Schultz,” 1958-04-18, University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed October 9, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-js9h8883.
MLA: “Harold Schultz.” 1958-04-18. University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. October 9, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-js9h8883>.
APA: Harold Schultz. Boston, MA: University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-js9h8883