Leo Frank Trial - Week Three - Leo Frank Takes Witness Stand

The Leo Frank trial was the most unconventional occurrence in US legal history. The defendant's admission at the trial's conclusion amounted toward emulating a confessional session that had taken place earlier. The People versus Leo M. Frank murder trial, which lasted a month and took place in Georgia's Fulton County Superior Courthouse in the summer of 1913, included this admission. Leo Frank served as a National Pencil Company executive in Atlanta and as the 500-member Gate City Lodge's 500-member B'nai B'rith official president in 1912. The B'nai B'rith established the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, as a result of the conviction, which has become now well-known andboth politically influential and extremely significant. The grandstand seats of the most spectacular murder trial in Georgia history were filled with spectators.

Eight defense attorneys were led by Luther Z Rosser, while the prosecution team was made up of three people under the direction of Hugh M. Dorsey, the solicitor general, and Frank Arthur Hooper. As well as Ruben Rose Arnold and Rosser. The Leo Frank trial started on July 28, 1913, and continued for several days, resulting in a series of horrifying revelations. The presiding judge, the Honorable Leonard Strickland Roan, was separated from the jury of twelve white people by the witness stand. Leo Frank's testimony on Monday, August 18, 1913, in the afternoon marked the most intriguing day of the trial, which took place three weeks later. Leo M. Frank's sworn statement would be subject to special conditions and rules, according to Judge Roan. ⁣ Leo M. Frank's sworn statement was to be made under special circumstances, and Judge Roan outlined those conditions and applicable laws.

250 spellbound people closed ranks and leaned forward in expectation as soon as he climbed the stand. He had a reputation as a gas jet from his college days, and he lived up to it now with verbose, monotonous speech, interruptions for three out of almost four hours, and endless pencil calculations to drive home his main points. Leo Frank showed the jury original pages from his accounting books throughout his almost four-hour speech. The Leo Frank trial, where he was found guilty of killing Mary Phagan on April 26, 1913, is where the majority of the text's most significant details are found. Leo Frank was charged with detailing the accounting calculations he had made on the afternoon of April 26, 1913, in an effort to convince the court that he had been far too busy to have killed Mary Phagan on that day, nearly 15 weeks earlier.

The defense emphasized how long it took Frank to complete the accounting books, but the real issue was: where was Leo Frank between 12:05 and 12:10 p.m? Monteen Stover testified that she discovered Leo Frank's office empty during this five-minute time period on Saturday, April 26, 1913, and the evidence had already established that Mary Phagan was killed between 12:05 and 12:15 p.m. Leo Frank was present in the same factory's metal room, which housed the metals.⁣There weren't many suspects in the building because April 26, 1913, Confederate Memorial Day, was a state holiday in Georgia and the factory and offices were shut down, with the exception of a few workers who came in to collect. Two investigators testified that Leo Frank had never left his office from noon until after 12:45, and if his alibi held up or was valid, he couldn't have killed Mary Phagan. However, April 26, 1913 was a state holiday in Georgia, commemorating the holiday and the factory and offices were closed. Frank claimed that he might have used the restroom during that time after talking about almost irrelevant topics for hours, putting him in the only publish washroom on that floor of the building—the metal room bathroom. This was even more remarkable considering that weeks earlier Leo Frank had firmly and ⁣ asserted and continuously insisted to the seven-person panel, chaired by Coroner Paul Donohue, that he did not use the restroom during the time of the murder.

Paul Donahue, a coroner who is both visually impaired and a prodigious savant, expressed his expected shock. He was surprised as one might expect. Leo Frank appeared to be attempting to physically and mentally get away from the bathroom where Jim Conley claimed to have discovered the body. ⁣Frank finally admitted that he might have used the restroom during that time after rambling on about near-irrelevant topics for hours. This put him in the metal room bathroom, the only restroom on that floor of the building. This was even more remarkable considering that Leo Frank had insisted, weeks earlier, to the seven-person panel, chaired by Coroner Paul Donohue, that he did not use the restroom throughout the day. ⁣It appeared as though Leo Frank was making an effort to get as far away as possible from the restroom where Jim Conley claimed to have discovered the body.

⁣At 3:56 p.m., Newt Lee entered the lobby on the second floor. m. Leo Frank requested that I spend two hours out on the town before returning at 6:00 p.m. The double doors halfway up the staircase were locked when Lee arrived back. When Leo Frank attempted to punch in a new timesheet for the night watchman Lee to register, Newt Lee saw his boss bungling and almost fumbling the timesheet on Saturday afternoons when he unlocked the doors and entered Leo Frank's office. It was revealed prior to the trial that Leo Frank had earlier informed Newt Lee that it was a National Pencil Company policy that once the night watchman arrived at the factory, as Lee had done the day of the murder at 4:00 p.m.

The most crucial information in this text is that Leo Frank was not permitted to leave the structure until he had turned over control of security to the day Watchmen company. This was brought on by the lack of resources, the danger of fire, and the high cost of the essential factory equipment. The two-hour timetable used to reschedule the postponed baseball game, the unexpected security rule waiver, the clumsy handling of a new timesheet, the locked double doors, and Frank's eerily animated demeanor were all highlighted by the prosecution. In the testimony of two African American witnesses, Janitor James, Jim Conley, and Leo Frank, a nearly demonic plot to capture the innocent night watchman Newt Lee was made clear. Leo Frank was placed between two layers of African Americans and the murder of Mary Phagan in the intricately designed plot for the twelve white men who would decide his fate.

The most crucial information in this text is that Leo Frank, a Jew who was considered white in the racial segregationist old south, was the one who initially attempted to blame the elderly, married, and unpunished African American Newt Lee for the rape and murder of Mary Phagan. In response to the defense team's intrigue, Jim Conley acknowledged he had assisted the real murderer, Leo Frank, with the clean-up after the fact in order to stop Conley from disclosing any more about the actual resolution to the crime. The new murder theory advanced by the defense team for Leo Frank was that Mary Phagan was attacked by Jim Conley as she descended the stairs from Leo Frank's office. They claimed that after Phagan entered the first floor lobby, she was robbed and then thrown through the two foot by two foot scuttle hole next to the elevator 14 feet to the basement. The Leo Frank trial is where the text's most significant details are found.

Leo Frank and Newt Lee were purposefully left alone in a police interrogation room at the Atlanta police station, where investigators set up a conversation between them. Leo Frank reprimanded Newt Lee for attempting to discuss the murder of Mary Phagan and warned him that if he continued, he and Lee would both enter hell immediately. Jewish opinion has become centered on the idea that Jim Conley, rather than 14-year-old Monteen Stover, who defended Leo Frank's character before accidentally revealing his false alibi, was the trial's key witness. Supporters of Leo Frank downplay the significance of Monteen Stover's trial testimony and Leo Frank's valiant attempt to refute it on August 18, 1913. In his 29-page commutation order from June 21–9, Governor John M. Slayton also disregarded the Stover-Frank incident.

⁣The most crucial information in this text is that many Frank supporters have chosen to downplay the importance of Monteen Stover by focusing solely on Jim Conley and then claiming that Jim Conley's absence prevented Leo Frank from being convicted. Only because no one ever foresaw the significance of Jim Conley telling the jury that he had discovered Mary Phagan dead in the middle room, has this question been left open for speculation. In the September 1915 issue of his magazine Watson's, Tom Watson addressed the "no conviction without Conley" controversy but it's time for a twenty-first century justification to explain why even the Georgia Supreme Court decided that the trial's evidence and testimony upheld Frank's conviction.

Leo Frank's four-hour long unsworn statement served as the trial's climax, and Frank was given the last word before closing arguments. Frank Hoover spoke for five minutes in his own defense without being sworn in, disputing the testimony of others that he knew Mary Phagan by name and had entered the dressing room with another worker of the business for ostensibly immoral purposes. Reiterating his "unconscious visit," he also says. Frank acknowledged in a newspaper interview that was printed in the Atlanta Journal Constitution in March 1914 that he might have visited another area of the building during this time that he couldn't clearly recall. He acknowledged that he didn't realize it would take force to achieve his goal when he followed the child back into the middleroom and that Jim Conley overheard a scream that sounded like a laugh that had been severed into a shriek. The stillness of the quiet building was broken by its sound.