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Famous Trials: U. S. V Korematsu (Japanese American Exclusion Case)
This article explains the United States v Korematsu (The Japanese-American Exclusion Case)during WWW II Japanese-Americans were subject to relocation camps. It also includes a video with Korematsu.
University of Missouri
Famous Trials: Trials of Giordano Bruno (1592 1600)
In the early morning light of Ash Wednesday, the primary day in the Church calendar for Christian penance, Giordano Bruno, one of the most original minds of the sixteenth century, rode into Rome's Campo de' Fiori on a mule. Stripped...
University of Missouri
Famous Trials: George Zimmerman ("Trayvon Martin") Trial (2013)
Trayvon Martin was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Walking back from a 7-Eleven to the Sanford, Florida townhouse of his father's fiancee on a dark and rainy February evening in 2012, Martin aroused the suspicions of neighborhood...
University of Missouri
Famous Trials: The Trial of Gaius Verres: An Account (79 Bc)
The records of the trial of Gaius (sometimes spelled Caius) Verres reveal--far better than any other extant source--the corruption of the last years of the Roman Republic. Through a series of orations and witnesses, Verres's prosecutor,...
University of Missouri
Famous Trials: Molly Maguires Trials (1876 77)
In 1875, a writer of the time observed, there came from coal-mining district of Pennsylvania "an appalling series of tales of murder, of arson, and of every description of violent crime." Mine company superintendents and bosses "could...
University of Missouri
Famous Trials: Lizzie Borden Trial (1893)
"Lizzie Borden took an axe, And gave her mother forty whacks, When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one." Actually,the Bordens received only 29 whacks, not the 81 suggested by the famous ditty, but the popularity of...
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Famous Trials: Lenny Bruce Trial (1964)
"What does it mean to be found obscene in New York? This is the most sophisticated city in the country....If anyone is the first person to be found obscene in New York, he must feel utterly depraved." --Lenny Bruce, after his conviction...
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Famous Trials: Matthew Shepard Murder (Mc Kinney and Henderson) Trials (1999)
This article focuses on the murder of Matthew Shepard. Matthew Shepard was gay. Tied to the fence as we was, the sheriff allowed that it did look a bit like a crucifixion. With little more than that, a consensus quickly emerged that...
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Famous Trials: Lapd (King Beating) Trials (1992 1993)
It seemed like an open-and-shut case. The George Holliday video, played on television so often that an executive at CNN called it "wallpaper," showed three Los Angeles police officers--as their supervisor watched-- kicking, stomping on,...
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Famous Trials: Mutiny on the Bounty Court Martial (1792)
The true story of the the 1789 mutiny on the Bounty is far more complicated than suggested by film versions of the event, which have emphasized the gratuitous cruelty of the ship's captain, William Bligh. The psychological drama that...
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Famous Trials: Moussaoui (9/11) Trial (2006)
"He killed the 9/11 victims as surely as if he had been at the controls of one of those airplanes." --U. S. Attorney Robert Spencer, in his opening statement in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only man tried for the 9/11 attacks...
University of Missouri
Famous Trials: West Memphis Three Trials (1994)
On a warm sunny May day three eight-year-old boys set off on a bike ride around their hometown of West Memphis, Arkansas. The next afternoon, their bruised and mutilated hog-tied naked bodies were pulled from a stream, setting off an...
University of Missouri
Famous Trials: Thomas More Trial (1535)
"I die the king's good servant, and God's first."--Thomas More. There is much to learn from the story of how the head of one of the most revered men in England, Sir Thomas More, ended up on the chopping block on London's Tower Hill in...
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Famous Trials: The Trials of Dr. Jack Kevorkian (1992 99)
He called his invention "the thanatron." It was an inexpensive contraption. A jewelry chain, parts from an Erector Set, an old motor, an intravenous line, and three plastic bottles. One of the bottles contained a saline solution, another...
University of Missouri
Famous Trials: The Trial of Joan of Arc (1431)
The story of Joan of Arc, the peasant girl whose religious visions altered the history of France, has been told often. And like so many stories in history, things do not end well for Joan. On May 30, 1431, after a lengthy and highly...
University of Missouri
Famous Trials: Anthony Burns (Fugitive Slave) Trial of 1854
The extradition of Anthony Burns as a fugitive slave was the most memorable case of the kind that has occurred since the adoption of the Federal Constitution. It was memorable for the place and for the time of its occurrence; the place...
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Famous Trials: Sheriff Shipp Trial (1907 09)
"I am ready to die. But I never done it. I am going to tell the truth. I am not guilty. I have said all the time that I did not do it, and it is true. I was not there. I know I am going to die and I have no fear to die and I have no fear...
University of Missouri
Famous Trials: Sam Sheppard Trials (1954 & '66)
On July 4, 1954, Marilyn Sheppard, the wife of a handsome thirty-year-old doctor, Sam Sheppard, was brutally murdered in the bedroom of their home in Bay Village, Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie. Sam Sheppard denied any involvement in...
University of Missouri
Famous Trials: Ruby Ridge (Weaver) Trial (1993)
In the 1980s, the mountainous panhandle of northern Idaho became a magnet for right-wingers of all stripes. Government-haters, minority-haters, immigrant-haters, and modern culture-haters all found refuge in the sparsely-populated...
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Famous Trials: Trial of the Nazi Saboteurs (1942)
The eight Germans who landed on beaches were all graduates of a training school for saboteurs. The idea for a sabotage effort in America developed in late 1941, soon after a German spy network in the United States imploded when one of...
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Famous Trials: Trial of Anne Hutchinson (1637)
America was not always the "Land of Liberty." In the 1630s, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, questioning Puritan dogma could bring you a world of trouble. It could get you shunned, it could get you ex-communicated, it could even get you...
University of Missouri
Famous Trials: The Osage "Reign of Terror" Murder Trials
The "Reign of Terror" that overtook the Osage Reservation in 1921 is just one chapter in the long story of mistreatment of Native Americans by whites, but is one of the most horrifying. Before the chapter ends, untold dozens of Osage...
University of Missouri
Famous Trials: Mountain Meadows Massacre (1875 76)
Called "the darkest deed of the nineteenth century," the brutal 1857 murder of 120 men, women, and children at a place in southern Utah called Mountain Meadows remains one of the most controversial events in the history of the American...
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Rhea County: Scopes Evolution Trial Information
An article about the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. It briefly recounts the substance of the trial and the participants. Find out what happened to William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow, and John Scopes.