20 Historical Trials That Spiraled Into Total Chaos

In Salem Village, Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1692, a special court headed by Chief Magistrate William Stoughton found that spectral evidence, the accusation that a suspect’s specter haunted and harmed the afflicted girls, was sufficient for conviction. Nineteen witches were hanged. When the accusers began to accuse the wife of Royal Governor William Phips, he disbanded the court and ruled that no spectral evidence would be admitted.

The 32-year-old Lizzie Borden stood trial in 1893 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, accused of the hatchet killings of her father, Andrew Borden, and stepmother Abby Borden during the previous summer. The prosecution never found a weapon or bloody clothing, and the court threw out Borden’s contradictory statements, made without a lawyer while she was on morphine. In addition, Victorian assumptions about respectable women worked in her favor. The jury deliberated for close to 90 minutes and then acquitted her, and the murders remain officially unsolved.

Oscar Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s companion Lord Alfred Douglas, for libel in 1895, after Queensberry left a card at Wilde’s club accusing him of “posing somdomite [sic].” Queensberry’s defense lawyer was Edward Carson, who used Wilde’s own writings and private life to argue that the accusation was true. After three days, Wilde withdrew his charge, but the evidence presented in court was shared with prosecutors, who arrested Wilde only hours later. Wilde was found guilty on separate charges of gross indecency and sentenced to two years of hard labor.

In 1431, Joan of Arc, the teenage French military commander who had played a key role in the coronation of King Charles VII, was put on trial for heresy at Rouen by a church court under the control of Bishop Pierre Cauchon, who operated in the interests of the English. Despite her lack of education, she proved a formidable opponent for her interrogators. Found guilty, she was executed by burning at the stake, ostensibly for having reverted to dressing as a man rather than for alleged sorcery. A papal court subsequently ruled the conviction unjust and exonerated her. She was canonized some years later.

In January 897, Pope Stephen VI ordered the exhumation of his late predecessor, Pope Formosus, who’d been deceased for nearly nine months, and put his corpse on trial in Rome. The purpose was to void all of Formosus’s papal decrees. He was attired in robes, seated on a throne, and allowed a deacon to speak on his behalf. Found guilty, he had his fingers cut off, and his body was tossed into the Tiber River. A revolt broke out later that year, and Pope Stephen VI was strangled in his cell.

In July of 1925, high school biology teacher John Scopes went on trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for violating a state law that prohibited the teaching of human evolution in public schools. Scopes’s defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, made the unusual decision to call the lead prosecutor, William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate, to the stand as an expert on the Bible, and spent two hours questioning him about the literal truth of biblical passages. Scopes was found guilty and fined, but Bryan died five days after the trial concluded.

When the parliamentary forces were victorious in the English Civil War, some of Oliver Cromwell’s supporters established a high court in 1649 to try the king, Charles I, for treason against his subjects. Charles refused to plead, demanding to know by what authority a court of Commons could put an anointed king on trial. He was found guilty and executed by beheading on January 30, 1649. However, his unwillingness to accept the court’s jurisdiction cast doubt over the legitimacy of the entire trial.

In 1854, Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to an English baronetcy, disappeared, believed dead at sea. Twelve years later, an illiterate, plump Australian butcher named Arthur Orton arrived on the scene and claimed to be him. Despite his inability to speak French, the language that the real Roger spoke with ease, Roger’s distraught mother took him as her son. Orton litigated his way through more than 1,000 legal days of civil and criminal action, ultimately being found guilty of perjury in 1874, by which time the legal expenses had ruined the Tichborne estate.

In 1786, Jeanne de Valois-Motte, an accomplished grifter, forged the signature of Queen Marie Antoinette to dupe Cardinal de Rohan into purchasing an expensive diamond necklace on credit, saying that the queen secretly desired the jewelry. When payment fell through, Louis XVI ordered Rohan’s arrest and demanded that the matter be tried publicly so as to prove his wife’s innocence. However, the court found Rohan not guilty. His defense revealed royal excess to the public, and those listening hailed it as a victory against the queen, an unpopular figure who had never actually been involved.

In 1386, a sow in the Normandy town of Falaise was arrested on charges of killing an infant. Medieval courts took these kinds of murders seriously enough that the pig was assigned a lawyer, had witnesses called against it, and was indicted for murder. The sow was found guilty and then hanged in public. We have records that document payments to the hangman for carrying out the execution, including for purchasing new gloves for the occasion. Eventually, the story evolved so that the sow appeared in court wearing a jacket and bonnet, but there’s no contemporary source that mentions this.

Socrates was put on trial in front of about 500 Athenian citizens in 399 BC on charges of corrupting the youth and of impiety. This followed the Peloponnesian War, when many Athenians did not trust him because he had been associated with some of the leaders of the short-lived anti-democratic regime. He was found guilty, and since he had to suggest his own penalty according to the laws of Athens at the time, he suggested that he should be granted free meals for life. This was the customary reward given to Olympic victors. The jury was so offended at the suggestion that they voted by an even wider margin that he should die by drinking hemlock.

In London, police arrested Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, known socially by female names, in 1870 after spotting them exiting a theater in female evening gowns, and the following year prosecutors charged them with conspiracy to commit a serious criminal offense. Because cross-dressing wasn’t in itself a crime, prosecutors relied on physical examinations and the defendants’ practice of going by female names. But defense lawyers demonstrated that cross-dressing in theatrical circles was commonplace, and even the judge noted that he didn’t think there was much of a case. The jury acquitted both men in less than an hour.

In 1887, The Times alleged that Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Nationalists, had endorsed a political murder in letters purportedly written by him. In 1889, a parliamentary inquiry looked into the matter. Journalist Richard Pigott testified he found the letters in Paris. The defense barrister, Sir Charles Russell, saw that every one of the forged letters misspelled “hesitancy” as “hesitency,” then called Pigott to the stand and asked him to write it down. Pigott wrote “hesitency,” incriminating himself as the forger. He fled to Madrid and committed suicide. Parnell was exonerated.

In 1820, the British Parliament was urged by King George IV to try his separated wife, Caroline of Brunswick, in the House of Lords for having committed adultery with her courier, Bartolomeo Pergami. George hoped to have her stripped of her royal title and end their marriage. Henry Brougham, the counsel for Caroline, made the trial an opportunity to reveal George IV’s own extravagance. The public reaction in Caroline’s favor led to riots in London, and the government’s majority in the Lords dwindled to such an extent that the bill was dropped.

In 1859, after Congressman Daniel Sickles learned that Philip Barton Key II, a federal prosecutor, had been having an affair with Sickles’s wife, Teresa, he tracked Key down to Lafayette Square and shot him dead. When Sickles stood trial, his defense attorney, Edwin Stanton, later Lincoln’s Secretary of War, argued for the first time in America that Sickles had committed the murder in a state of “temporary insanity” brought on by his sorrow at his wife’s betrayal. The jury agreed, and the crowd celebrated Sickles as the savior of marriage. It opened the door for similar arguments in later cases.

Founding Father George Wythe, a legal scholar and signatory to the Declaration of Independence, died in Richmond, Virginia, of arsenic poisoning in 1806, together with a young freed black man, Michael Brown. George Wythe’s grandnephew, George Sweeney, had poisoned the household coffee to collect his inheritance early. Wythe’s freed housekeeper, Lydia Broadnax, saw Sweeney stirring something into the pot, but under Virginia law, a black woman was not allowed to testify against a white man, so her testimony was thrown out. The case fell apart, and an all-white jury acquitted Sweeney.

Quaker preachers William Penn, later to be the founder of Pennsylvania, and William Mead were tried at London’s Old Bailey in 1670 for unlawful assembly, after Penn had preached to a crowd as part of a Crown drive to crack down on non-Anglican worship. When the jury wouldn’t convict, Recorder John Howell threatened to lock them up “without meat, drink, fire, and tobacco” until they starved. The jurors were fined and jailed anyway, but juror Edward Bushell’s appeal produced a ruling that judges can never punish a jury for its verdict.

In 1735, German-American printer John Peter Zenger was tried in New York City for seditious libel. His newspaper published a series of anonymous articles criticizing the corrupt actions of the colony’s Royal Governor, William Cosby. Under English law at the time, the truth wasn’t a valid defense against libel charges. But Andrew Hamilton, a Philadelphia lawyer, spoke directly to the jury, arguing that the truth should protect a critic from tyranny, even though that violated existing law. The jury disregarded the judge’s instructions and acquitted Zenger within minutes.

During the 1957 trial of Dr. John Bodkin Adams, a wealthy doctor from Eastbourne, England, for the murder of his elderly patient Edith Alice Morrell, prosecutors claimed that he had killed several other elderly people because they had money he could then inherit. The lead prosecutor didn’t bother to read eight years’ worth of daily nursing logbooks. When defense lawyer Geoffrey Lawrence presented them to the jury, it became obvious the drugs had been properly prescribed to relieve terminal suffering. The jury took just 45 minutes to acquit Adams. He was later fined only for unrelated prescription violations.

In 1924, after Adolf Hitler’s failed armed coup, the Beer Hall Putsch, the previous November, the leader of the Nazi Party was brought to trial for treason in Munich. He was able to speak for hours in court, with the sympathetic judge letting him openly admit his intention to overthrow the government and attack his prosecutors. His every word was reported in newspapers around the country. Sentenced to five years for treason, Hitler served less than nine months, writing his book Mein Kampf while in jail.

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