The Hanging Judge (27 page)
Dominic Daley, Hooker said, took the lead in the murder of Marcus Lyon, willingly assisted by James Halligan. After shooting the young man in the ribs and then smashing his skull in with the pistol butt, both defendants dragged the corpse from the Post Turnpike and threw it into the Chicopee River. Hooker noted particularly the increased rate of travel adopted by the alleged killers after their crime: Daley and Halligan “were five days, from Tuesday to Saturday, in coming to Wilbraham from Boston, a distance of eighty miles, but a little more than two in going thence to Cross Cob Landing, a distance of one hundred and thirty miles.”
Hooker promised to present evidence during the trial that a witness from Boston, a “Mr. Syms,” would identify the defendants as having purchased the pistol that was found near Lyon’s body. It later emerged during Syms’s actual testimony, however, that all he could say was that he sold the pistol to someone with an Irish accent. He could not identify either of the defendants as the purchaser. Moreover, Hooker promised to confirm through another witness that some unusual banknotes found on Halligan at the time of his arrest had previously been in the possession of the victim. No witness ever offered testimony to this effect, and at the end of the trial the prosecution had to concede that the banknote evidence was worthless. But the seeds had been planted.
When Hooker sat down, the Commonwealth called the first of its twenty-four witnesses. By far the most important of these was the thirteen-year-old boy Laertes Fuller. The defense objected to the admission of Fuller’s testimony, arguing that the boy’s youth rendered him incompetent to take the stand, but Justice Sedgwick quickly overruled this quibble.
After taking his oath, the boy described how on November 9, 1805 at about one o’clock in the afternoon he had seen two unknown men on the Post Turnpike, heading west. A few minutes after they had passed out of sight, Fuller himself began traveling on the same road and in the same direction the two strangers had taken. The sequence of events now described by the witness was somewhat confused. According to his testimony, shortly after the boy began walking down the Post Turnpike going west, he saw the same two unknown men coming back, now with a horse identified by other witnesses as belonging to Marcus Lyon. From the witness box, the boy pointed out Daley as the man leading the horse that afternoon and carrying a bundle tied up in a blue handkerchief. This bundle, the prosecutor suggested to the jurors, contained the murder weapon, the broken pistol later found by the search party. According to the boy, as Daley approached leading the horse, the second stranger followed behind, driving the animal along in haste.
Fuller told the jury that he then followed the two men onto a side road, but when they came to the top of a hill, one of the men jumped on the horse and rode off. Fuller said that, after this, he went on his way to an orchard nearby to look for fallen apples. Daley, now on his own, approached an adjoining stone wall, leaned on it, and stood looking at the boy for about fifteen minutes without saying anything. After this interval, the second man returned without the horse, and the two men resumed walking west down the turnpike. On cross-examination by Halligan’s lawyer, Francis Blake, Laertes Fuller admitted that he never heard the discharge of any pistol that day, and that he could not in any way identify Halligan as the man accompanying Daley.
The presentation of the Commonwealth’s two dozen witnesses consumed most of the day. After the testimony, Hooker offered a short summary of the prosecution’s evidence, arguing that if both the prisoners participated in murdering Lyon, or if one did the killing while aided and abetted by the other, then “they are both murderers in the view of the law and you are bound by your oath to pronounce them guilty.”
When Hooker took his seat, Sewall and Sedgwick turned to defense counsel and inquired whether they had any witnesses to present. With only two days for preparation, it could not have come as a surprise that no testimony would be offered on behalf of the two prisoners. The only potential defense witnesses conceivably available would have been the defendants themselves. But in 1806, and for sixty years thereafter, Massachusetts law barred a criminal defendant from testifying on his own behalf on the ground of inherent bias. Before considering the verdict, the jury would never be permitted to hear either Daley or Halligan speak a word denying the murder.
With no witnesses to offer, Attorney Francis Blake of Worcester stepped forward to present his final argument on behalf of James Halligan. By this time, it was about nine in the evening. Blake began by telling the jury that he “read in your countenances the deep and distressing anxiety” caused by the task before them. But “painful and distressing as your situation,” he said, “you will readily imagine that mine cannot be less critical and embarrassing than yours.” This was the first time, he told the men, that he had addressed a jury in Hampshire County, and the first time he had “ever spoken in the presence of an audience so numerous and so deeply interested in the event of a trial.” Moreover, he was suffering from a severe cold—“an indisposition which almost denies me the power of utterance.”
Blake noted two other severe handicaps he faced. First, “the prisoners have been tried, convicted, and condemned, in almost every barroom and barbershop, and in every other place of public resort in the county.” And, second, he confronted “the inveterate hostility against the people of that wretched country from which the prisoners have emigrated, for which the people of New England are particularly distinguished.”
With these preliminaries aside, Blake proceeded with a fierce denunciation of the evidence against Halligan. First, not a single witness could confirm with any certainty that Marcus Lyon had been killed on November 9, the only day the defendants had been in the area, rather than on the day before, or even earlier. Second, the only opportunity the defendants might have had to kill Lyon, even accepting that the murder occurred on November 9, would have been “in the broad glare of day, on a public turnpike road, where travelers were continually passing, and within a few rods of houses in every direction.” It was much more likely, he pointed out, that the attack had occurred “on the evening or night preceding, and by some midnight assassin.”
Blake reminded the jurors that the defendants’ greater speed after November 9 might have many explanations, including the common experience that men traveling on foot tended to increase their pace after the first few days, as they became more inured to the rigors of travel. Moreover, the testimony of the Commonwealth’s chief witness, Laertes Fuller, suffered at least three deficiencies: First, due to the boy’s age he was “not entitled to full and unlimited credit”; second, his testimony was “in its nature, vague and uncertain,” and, third, Fuller’s evidence was “highly improbable and inconsistent in itself.” The thirteen-year-old never identified Halligan at all, never heard a pistol shot, could not positively identify the horse they were leading, and never mentioned the incident to anyone until the next day. Moreover, according to the time frame described by the boy, Daley and Halligan would have had to ambush Lyon, murder him, dispose of his body in the Chicopee River under a sixty-five pound boulder, and return with his horse, all in the space of only fifteen minutes.
“Is it in the nature of things,” Blake asked, “is it within the scope of human probability, is it credible, is it even possible that this complicated work of robbery and murder could have been thus secretly and silently achieved in the little time allowed for the foul purposes by the testimony of this witness?”
No. The only explanation for a conviction in this case, Blake argued, would be what he termed the “national prejudice,” which would lead the jurors “to prejudge the prisoners because they are Irishmen.”
“With all our boasted philanthropy,” Blake declaimed, “which embraces every circle on the habitable globe, we have yet no mercy for a wandering and expatriated fugitive from Ireland. The name of an Irishman is, among us, but another name for a robber and assassin. Every man’s hand is lifted against him, and when a crime of unexampled atrocity is perpetrated among us, we look around for an Irishman. Because he is an outlaw, with him the benevolent maxim of our law is reversed, and the moment he is accused, he is presumed to be guilty, until his innocence appears!”
When Blake concluded, the judges afforded one of the attorneys for Dominic Daley, Thomas Gould, the opportunity to address the jury. Gould, however, only stood and stated: “The evening having so far elapsed, and the prisoners signifying their assent, I decline to address the jury.”
The result of Gould’s inexplicable waiver was that the jury heard no testimony from any defense witnesses, and not a single direct comment by any advocate for Daley on the flaws in the testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses.
After Gould’s retreat, Attorney General Sullivan submitted the prosecution’s final argument to the jury. His presentation was workmanlike, but compared with Blake’s fiery remarks, somewhat equivocal. If the Commonwealth’s witnesses were believed, he said, the jurors must conclude that Lyon “was in fact murdered, and the prisoners were in a situation where they might have committed the deed, and there is no evidence that it was committed by anyone else.” After that, the case simply rested on whether the jurors believed Laertes Fuller.
“Our state of existence is imperfect,” Sullivan said, “and our intelligence limited; yet when our duty calls upon us to act, we need not tremble for fear of doing wrong; we are candidates for another state of existence, on the introduction to which our fate will not depend upon the enquiry whether we have done right, but whether we have acted with an upright heart, and from pure motives.”
After these ambiguous remarks, Sullivan resumed his seat, and Judge Sedgwick immediately gave the jury its charge on the law. His directives steered the jury toward conviction with far more force than anything Sullivan had said. Referring to Laertes Fuller, Sedgwick stated, untruly, that the boy’s description of the events had always been consistent. Moreover—despite the fact that Fuller’s testimony, even if believed, constituted no more than circumstantial evidence against either defendant, and the fact that the boy never identified Halligan at all—Sedgwick instructed the jury that “if you believe this witness, gentlemen, you must return a verdict of conviction. When it is proved to you that Lyon was murdered, that the prisoners were on the same road, in possession of his property almost upon the very spot where the body was found, rendering no account of themselves whatever during that period, you can hardly have a reasonable doubt but they are guilty of the crime of which they are accused.”
At ten in the evening, the jurors retired to deliberate; one hour later, they informed the court officer that they had reached a unanimous decision. As Daley’s wife and mother looked on, Justus Dwight, the foreperson, read out the verdict in the silent meetinghouse: “We, the jury, being fully agreed, find Dominic Daley and James Halligan guilty of the murder of the foresaid Marcus Lyon in the indictment.”
Judge Sedwick promptly scheduled the sentencing for the next day. The trial had consumed, including breaks, a total of fourteen hours.
PART THREE
36
A
ssistant U.S. Attorney Lydia Gomez-Larsen stepped around counsel table into the well of the court and placed herself before the empty faces of the newly selected jury. Voir dire, the second time around, had produced a far luckier draw. In place of the Dragon Lady, Seat One held a young man bearing an expression of reasonable receptivity—not a trace, thank heaven, of the Unitarian’s overt, deadly skepticism. The season, too, had warmed up, drifted into May, and from the courtroom windows the banks of the Connecticut River were visible, with pale-green willows hanging over the water like horses drinking. There was hope.
As was her custom during openings, the AUSA carried no notes and used no podium. Her outfit was a navy business suit—skirt and jacket, white blouse—and she wore no jewelry except for her gold wedding band. Cradled against her right hip, however, was an ugly-looking automatic rifle pointed toward the courtroom’s high ceiling. After a nod from Judge Norcross, Gomez-Larsen’s mild but crisply audible voice broke the silence.
“May it please the court, Mister Foreperson, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. On October 22 of last year, at approximately eight thirty a.m., this man, Clarence Hudson …” Here, she pointed with her free hand at the defendant and looked at him for a count of three. Moon tried to return her gaze, then shifted, and looked down at his hands. “… using an assault rifle just like this one, shot down two people in broad daylight, near the corner of Walnut and High Streets in Holyoke, ten miles north of here. In a carefully planned act of premeditated murder, that man right there, Clarence Hudson, sometimes known as Moon Hudson, shot Edgar Delgado in cold blood, firing a customized version of this Norinco SKS assault rifle through the back window of a stolen Nissan Stanza. Delgado, who used the nickname Peach, was twenty-three years old at the time.
“Hudson fired nine shots. Three hit Peach Delgado, one in the left leg, one in the belly, and a third in the upper chest, right through his heart. Delgado died almost instantly. At the same time, a few doors down the street, a stray bullet, fired by this man right here”—again, she pointed to Hudson—“struck his second victim, Ginger Daley O’Connor. As she was bending over to pet a puppy, a bullet from the assault rifle passed through Ginger O’Connor’s neck and tore open her carotid artery. That’s the big blood vessel, right along the side of your throat, right here. Mrs. O’Connor was forty-two years old, a lifelong resident of Holyoke, married and the mother of three boys, seventeen, fifteen, and eleven. Shot by this man, Ginger O’Connor bled to death on the sidewalk in front of the neighborhood clinic where she volunteered.”