The Trial A History, from Socrates to O.J. Simpson
By Sadakat Kadri
Random House, 2005

Review by Ronald Goldfarb

Criminal trials provide the most dramatic and public face of justice, and though they make up only about 5 percent of all court cases, demonstrate the nature of our morals, values, and justice system. Famous trials, for this reason, are recurring subjects of books, both individual cases and collections.

Sadakat Kadri’s recent book, The Trial: A History, from Socrates to O. J. Simpson, is not such a collection; it is an eccentric encyclopedic analysis—a full and witty one—of historic stages of criminal trials. His chapters—“From Eden to Ordeals,” “The Inquisition,” “The Jury Trial,” “The Witch Trial,” “The Trials of Animals, Corpses, and Things,” “The Moscow Show Trials,” “The War Crimes Trial,” and “The Jury Trial: A Theater of Justice”—are packed with a trove of information, much legal and related history, wry observations, and clever revelations about Western justice.

In his opening chapter, Kadri roves over ancient practices demonstrating the prevailing notion that “laws descend directly from the gods” and adjudication thus rests in their hands. He begins with Aeschylus’s Oresteia, “the oldest known courtroom drama in history.” However bizarre the story, the idea that justice dealt with both acts and intentions was explored then, as it has been ever since. Kadri roams from Greek to Roman trial systems and from barbarian times to more civilized early eras. He also develops the evolution of “collective justice as an honorable substitute for private vengeance” in this chapter. Kadri’s descriptions of old practices such as compurgation (proving innocence by gathering people to swear it), ordeal (burning, freezing, drowning), and combat (ritualistic battles) are enough to make our current trials—ordeals as they are—seem quaint and rational.

Kadri’s mastery of history and his sense of humor in describing it make his prodigious analysis of early eras such as the Inquisition a deft and amusing read—amusing once one gets past astonishment over the degree of barbarism, superstition, and unaccountability that prevailed. One is in awe of mankind’s history of inhumanity. The bloodthirsty malignity of the inquisitorial centuries was reformed—to some degree at least—in more enlightened times by the English jury system, to which he devotes a chapter.

In the original jury system the jurors were the exclusive witnesses, and trials were open, in distinction from continental practices. Corporal punishment and Star Chamber existed, but eventually the focus moved from condemnation to inquiry. Kadri describes some of these trials, such as Sir Walter Raleigh’s for treason and William Penn’s for unlawful assembly, with a wry humor and an amazing collection of anecdotal details.

By the 18th century the independent jury we know today was in place and common-law rules of evidence such as hearsay and the presumption of innocence had gained acceptance. So had pillories, penal colonies, corporal and public capital punishment, and other extreme forms of “justice.” There was, Kadri repeats, a “contrast between the safeguard of its trials and the brutality of its punishments,” one the English “rarely seemed to perceive.” The jury trial spread to other continents, and by the 20th century, Kadri concludes, it had come of age.

Kadri returns to the jury trial in a final chapter, commenting on well-known trials (John Scopes, Emmit Till, Bernard Goetz, O. J. Simpson), but always providing a fresh eye to the process. He refers, for example, to the jury trial as “rules of engagement that suspend reality even as they simulate it.”

In the most bizarre chapter, Kadri writes about the recurring, if ludicrous, trials of animals, corpses, and things. One reads here about trials of weevils for destroying crops, suckers for killing salmon, dumb animals for being the objects of sex by humans, all of which will make you wince—or laugh out loud. Though these animals could not be held morally wrong, their trials reflected some strange superstitious form of communal reaction sanctioned by biblical references. Kadri writes, “Proceedings against insects, animals, corpses, and things once reflected the hope of a magically coherent universe in which divine anathemas could prevent famine, no misdeed would go unpunished, and an object’s destruction might erase the evils it had done.”

Cadavers were exhumed so dead bodies could be ritualistically tried—even one dead pope was so disgraced. In England suicides were staked through the heart. Bales of hay stood trial for falling on and killing a farmer, as did train wheels for causing a crash.

Kadri takes these weird happenings up-to-date and wonders if they might be the source of modern states’ ordering capital punishment of juveniles and mentally retarded prisoners:

Kadri provides a chapter on the Moscow show trials of the 1930s in which thousands of innocent people were tortured into confessing and then tried and executed on the basis of their confessions. The goal was to eliminate political enemies and solidify the revolution through terror. Perversely, the trial process was used to accomplish that result.

Kadri’s chapter on the horrid Moscow show trials becomes more interesting when one reads his next chapter, on the war crimes trials. The 1945 Nuremberg trials of 21 leading Nazi war criminals was insisted upon by the same Joseph Stalin who had orchestrated the nightmarish trials in the Soviet Union. Churchill, I learned here, was in favor of summarily executing as many as 100 former Nazis, and Roosevelt was entertaining Treasury Secretary Morgenthau’s recommendation of shooting, not trying, up to 2,500. The now avowedly judicious Stalin insisted there be “no executions without trials otherwise the world would say we were afraid to try them.” Stalin’s motive really was political, not to differentiate between the innocent and the guilty, but to look fair to the watching world.

Kadri also writes about the Eichmann trial, My Lai, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and other incidents occurring after the genocide treaties resulting from Nuremberg, including abuses of imprisoned suspected terrorists currently in the news. He ends his chapter with these sentient thoughts:

In Kadri’s conclusion, reviewing the historical shifts in the conduct of criminal trials, the author points out modern American law has shifted the emphasis from concern about wrongful convictions to worries about unjust acquittals. Attitudes about punishment have also changed, from attempting to improve the wrongdoer’s morals to assuring just desserts, and to extending imprisonment (“human pest control,” he calls it). In recalibrating the scales of justice—his term again—we have recently filled prisons, extended capital punishment, and switched heroes in the courtroom drama from the righteous defense attorney to the tough district attorney, as movies and television demonstrate daily. He provides social science analyses about the role of community vilification in the trial process (recall Martha Stewart), and psychiatric references from Jung and Freud (the importance of condemning mischief makers, and demonstrating what is good and what is evil). Kadri suggests that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1981 ruling allowing televised trials was a transforming landmark. It opened the justice system to the public, providing a “community therapeutic value.”

Despite the judicial system’s imperfections and vagaries—inefficiency, counterintuitive rules, costliness—Kadri concludes on a positive note:

The Trial is an imaginative cornucopia of legal history, displayed by a deft and engaging writer. It isn’t what I thought I’d be reading when I opened the book, but I was enriched and entertained for having done so.