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5. The Second Trial
- The University of North Carolina Press
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147 5 THE SECOND TRIAL In the fall of 1872, the press and public anxiously awaited the start of the second trial. Popular attention now turned to Laura Fair’s new counsel, N. Greene Curtis, who, to most it seemed, had foolishly agreed to defend his client. At age fifty-one, Curtis was a highly respected lawyer who had served one term in the state senate between 1861 and 1862.1 Active in the Masons and elected as the Grand Master on four different occasions, he was long remembered not only for his political and civic activities but also for the critical role he played in Laura’s case. As the Reno Weekly Gazette and Stockman wrote in 1897 upon his death, Curtis “was a most eloquent speaker and while engaged in the practice of law was identified with most all of the great murder trials in the state. He defended Laura D. Fair.”2 Now in the court of Judge T. B. Reardon, who, like Laura and Alexander Crittenden, had been a resident of Virginia City in 1863, Curtis devised a defense strategy that differed significantly from that of his predecessor, Elisha Cook. The trial was no longer to be about the relationship between the intimate pair; it would not touch on her reputation or her colorful— some would argue sordid—history. Instead, in a much-abbreviated form that took half the time of the first, it would focus on only one issue: could Laura, at the moment of the shooting, be classified as insane?3 To their detriment, the prosecution, again led by Alexander Campbell and now the new district attorney, Daniel J. Murphy, complied with this strategy. Where in the past they had summarily dismissed the defense’s assertions of menstrual or temporary insanity and argued that the state could neither afford medical authorities nor needed to bring them into the court, in the second trial they conducted the case as the defense had defined it. Although according to law it was the defense’s obligation to prove Laura insane rather than the state’s responsibility to demonstrate her sanity, in this hearing, the prosecution turned to expert testimony in an attempt to establish that Laura was and always had been rational. Rather than 148 / The Second Trial convincing the jury of this assertion, however, the ensuing discussion of her mental health only seemed to raise the issue of whether medical science had any real understanding of insanity at all or could even define what it meant to be insane. At the same time that Curtis directed the attention of the court to the apparently perplexing question of insanity, he effectively recast Laura’s place in the trial. Curtis had learned well from the failed defense strategy of the first trial that had allowed the jury to focus on Laura’s reputation and personality. In the initial hearing, Laura’s “bold” personality dominated the proceedings. Demanding to be heard, she had spent days on the stand, detailing her relationship while attempting to reinvent her history. Instead of winning support, however, her performance in court and her affidavit dictated in prison convinced many that the verdict had been correct ; few doubted that she was a most rational individual.4 In the second trial, however, Curtis purposely took control of her image and her voice. Despite Laura’s desire once again to testify to the great love that she and Crittenden shared, Curtis made his position clear from the start. “She wanted me to put her on the stand and drag out her relations with Crittenden again,” he later explained to a reporter. “Now that would never have done. I told her so. Two or three times she discharged me because I wouldn’t do some foolish thing she wanted me to. But I’ve always treated her like a child and told her that she couldn’t discharge me and that no other man could take care of the case but me.” She was, as Curtis repeatedly asserted, not a rational adult at all but an unreasonable child who needed to be controlled and “taken care of” by a wise and authoritative man. Repeatedly referring to her as the “poor waif,” he attempted to make the citizens of San Francisco forget the image of the “remarkable” and “manly” woman who defied all social mores.5 If, throughout her life, she had never followed the advice-writers’ caution to “suffer and to be silent under suffering,” Curtis was now...