In this episode, we’ll revisit two murder trials that were held in revolutionary Boston. The first case was against four ordinary sailors accused of murdering an officer of the Royal Navy on a ship in Massachusetts coastal waters, and the other was against nine British prisoners of war who were accused of murdering a guard aboard a prison ship in Boston Harbor. The sailors were accused in 1769, when Boston was under military occupation and the tensions that would result in the Boston Massacre were coming to a head. The redcoats stood trial over a decade later, in the midst of a bloody war that had touched the lives of all Bostonians by 1780. In both cases, attorneys and judges worried whether a jury could deliver justice in a polarized city. Both cases were argued by signers of the Declaration of Independence, with John Adams defending the American sailors in 1780 and Robert Treat Paine prosecuting the redcoats in 1780. In both cases, the defendants argued that they had acted in self defense, and amazingly, both cases ended in acquittal.
Tag: Courtroom Drama
Episode 43: The Case of the Somnambulist
When young Albert Tirrell killed his lover Maria Bickford on Beacon Hill, it sparked a scandal that rocked Victorian Boston in the 1840s. It was a tale of seduction, murder, and the unlikeliest of defenses. In the end, he would be found not guilty, in the first successful use of sleepwalking as a defense against murder.
We apologize for Nikki’s head cold, some rough cuts that resulted from editing out her sniffles, and the couple of sniffles that made it into the final cut.