Rape in Chicago: Race, Myth, and the Courts

4. Order in the Court

4. Order in the Court During the 1960s the United States Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, handed down a series of opinions that altered the structure of criminal trials across the country. Following legal trends of the postwar era, the high court standardized how authorities treated criminal suspects. Although the U.S. Constitution had insured many rights of the accused for over a century, these protections were applied inconsistently.1 The Fourteenth Amendment began to change the application of federal protections to defendants tried in local courts, but prior to the 1960s, the Supreme Court had resisted applying rights defined in federal amendments at the state level. The Warren Court, however, changed the interpretation of the rights of the accused. In 1963, it handed down a decision in Gideon v. Wainright, which mandated that every criminal defendant at every level of prosecution had the right to legal representation in court.2 Other decisions that further expanded constitutional protections for the accused soon followed. Escabedo v. Illinois (1964) guaranteed suspects the right to have legal counsel present while the police questioned them and in 1966, the Court handed down Miranda v. Arizona, which required officers to read suspects their rights, including the right to legal representation and the right to “remain silent” upon arrest.3 At the local level, decisions about defendants’ rights dramatically changed the structure of criminal trials and introduced new complexities at the circuit level. While defendants in Chicago had enjoyed representation in court for decades prior to Gideon, the formal expansion of the rights of the accused during the 1960s created different legal points for defense attorneys to exploit at trial.4 They combined new strategies with already well-established assertions of police prejudice, especially on behalf of black defendants who 102 chapter 4 continued to be arrested and tried more often for rape than were white men. African Americans have, historically, been more heavily policed for all types of violent crimes in the United States, and this was especially true for sexual violence in light of racial myths about the beast rapist.5 Decisions that reorganized the trial process in order to protect defendants’ rights required prosecutors to support cases with expert testimony and thorough explanations of exhibits before they could be admitted as evidence. Judges also had to adhere carefully to newly standardized directives. They decided which testimony and evidence would be admitted during trials, but they also had to be cognizant of higher court opinions. It was possible the decisions that local judges had been making for years might not conform to new federal mandates, thus giving convicts legitimate grounds for appeals. The protection of the rights of the accused did not proceed without bias at the circuit level, but the emergence of new trial testimonies and altered legal tactics reveal the steady push for equality in Chicago courtrooms. A culture of rights, the expansion of constitutional protections, and an increase in the number of practicing attorneys in the United States encouraged more criminal appeals during the 1960s, even if higher courts continued to affirm most circuit-level convictions. At the same time, trial examinations of rape victims intensified. Judges, taking greater care to protect the rights of defendants, allowed a kind of testimonial latitude that they had prohibited in the past. Defense attorneys interrogated victims about their sexuality and, using a new approach, they also accused some women of being prostitutes who lied to get back at customers who refused to pay. In the story told by defense counsel, the alleged female victim was both sexually immoral and, potentially, a criminal herself . Why should the court, already historically suspicious of women lying about matters of sexuality, believe her when she cried rape? As defendants’ rights thus expanded, victims’ power contracted. Although a direct causal connection between these trends is unclear, what is evident is that, working simultaneously, they produced an increasingly hostile trial atmosphere for rape victims. As victims’ testimonies throughout the mid-twentieth century have demonstrated, talking about private sexual traumas in a formal judicial setting was never easy for women. In the rape trials of the 1960s, it became even more difficult for them to be heard. Additional witnesses called to corroborate victims’ accusations contributed to the complexity of the new rape trial—a complexity that drowned out almost completely the voices of women, as attorneys debated subtle points of law, and defendants made familiar claims about police brutality. Women continued to demand justice as they...