CBS News analyst talks famous court cases

Celebrities and politics have shaped verdicts in the courtroom long before the days of O.J. Simpson and Timothy McVeigh, said CBS News legal analyst Jack Ford.

Ford, who covered the Simpson and McVeigh trials during his years at TruTV, was the guest speaker Friday at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs public forum series.

Ford said courtroom trials are “prisms that allow you to look into the events of the time.” He said various aspects of celebrity — race, politics and war — seem to always find their way into the courtroom.

“[Trials] are like sepia snapshots,” Ford told a packed audience Friday. “They allow us to see who we were then and how we are different.”

Ford talked about three famous court cases he was not involved in but that are part of the undergraduate class he teaches at New York University on trials of the century.

The first was the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was convicted and executed for the 1932 death of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the son of famous American aviator Charles Lindbergh.

Hauptmann, whose defense attorney was paid by a media company interested in getting the exclusive story, was executed on April 3, 1936.

Ford, who researched the Lindbergh trial and compared it to the Simpson case, said more than 50,000 people came to Hopewell, N.J., to attend the trial and traffic was backed up for 10 hours to get to the courthouse.

“During the O.J. Simpson trial, so many people were talking about it being the trial of the century,” Ford said. “But when I looked at these two cases, I believe the Lindbergh case is actually the trial of the century. Lindbergh was the most famous man in the world and the world covered this trial.”

He said it was clear celebrity played a major role in the Lindbergh trial as jurors sat in awe when Charles Lindbergh came into the courtroom and sat beside them. They also had to withstand media who knocked on the doors of their hotel rooms in the evenings to get “the scoop,” Ford said.

“I talk about a snapshot,” Ford said. “How much of that is so different from what we do today?”

Ford also talked about the politics around the 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted and executed for being Soviet spies. He said research has shown federal investigators “squeezed” witnesses and fabricated evidence to convict Ethel Rosenberg and that Julius Rosenberg refused to turn over other Soviet spies in order to save his wife’s life.

Fear of communism and the Cold War made the 1950s a different time, Ford said. Governments and private companies forced employees to swear on the Bible they had never been part of the Communist Party.

The Rosenbergs, who denied they were spies, pleaded the Fifth Amendment during their trial and declined to answer questions about their allegiance to the Communist Party.

“They were so fearful they would take their own chances with the death penalty than admit they were members of the Communist Party,” Ford said.

Ford finished his talk by discussing the Mississippi murder trial that followed the killing of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old, in 1955. The youth was beaten and shot to death after he reportedly flirted with a white woman.

Till, who was raised in Chicago and attended schools with white students, was in Mississippi visiting family that summer, Ford said.

“The sadness is he wondered into the place and time that was very different from that in which he was raised,” Ford said.

The main suspects, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were tried and acquitted of murder charges by an all-white male jury. They later admitted in a paid interview to killing Till, Ford said.

Till became the “sacrificial lamb” for the civil rights movement and his death was a rallying cry for change that would come years later.

Ford said it’s important to study trials of the past to learn lessons that can be applied today and in the future.

“We all need to know where we’ve been, and these trials teach us who we are and where we come from,” Ford said.