The Trial
The trial began on May 6, 1833, and was heard by the Supreme Judicial Council (what is today the Rhode Island Supreme Court). The lawyers for the prosecution were Rhode Island Attorney General Albert C. Greene and former attorney general Dutee Jerauld Pearce. The six lawyers for the defense, hired by the Methodist Church, were led by former United States Senator and New Hampshire Attorney General Jeremiah Mason.
The trial lasted 27 days. Under Rhode Island law at the time, defendants in capital cases were not permitted to offer testimony in their own defense, so Avery did not get the opportunity to speak. However, both the prosecution and the defense called a large number of witnesses to testify, 68 for the prosecution, and 128 for the defense.
Although Jeremiah Mason maintained that Avery had not been present when the murder occurred, the larger part of the defense strategy was to call into question Sarah Cornell's morals. The defense characterized her as "utterly abandoned, unprincipled, profligate," and brought forth many witnesses to testify to her promiscuity, suicidal ideation and mental instability. Much was made of how Cornell had been cast out of the Methodist Church for fornication.
Sarah Maria Cornell had come from a fairly prosperous and prominent Connecticut family, but had fallen on hard times after her father, a successful paper cutter, had abandoned them. In her late teens and twenties, Cornell went back and forth between factory work and skilled employment as a seamstress. She acquired a reputation for petty theft and general "bad character". She moved from town to town in New England, engaging in several affairs along the way, and once contracting gonorrhea.
The prosecution largely attempted to portray the Methodist clergy as a dangerous, almost secret society, willing to defend their minister and the good name of their church at any cost.
A medical debate centered around whether the unborn child was in fact conceived in August, although Puritan standards of propriety regarding the female body sometimes made it difficult to elicit factual information. One female witness, when questioned as to the state of Cornell's body, absolutely refused to answer, saying, "I never heard such questions asked of nobody."
Read more about this topic: Ephraim Kingsbury Avery
Famous quotes containing the word trial:
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“Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident—the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.”
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