The Case of Dr. Samuel Sheppard
The Jury Speaks
Sheppard's trial (CORBIS)
The jury began its deliberations on Friday, Dec. 17, and worked through the weekend. By Tuesday, four days before Christmas, lawyers on both sides were starting to make plans for a second trial.
Then, after 100 hours of deliberation, the jury sent word: It had reached a verdict.
It found the defendant not guilty of murder in the first degree — Sheppard felt a momentary flash of elation — but guilty in the second degree.
Blythin asked the defendant if he had anything to say. Sheppard told him, "I would like to say, sir, that I am not guilty and I feel there have been facts presented before this court that definitely have proven that I couldn't have performed this crime.''
Over Corrigan's objection, Blythin passed immediate sentence: life in prison.
It turned out the jury had taken 18 ballots. The first, on Saturday, was six to six for conviction, though none favored conviction for first-degree murder, the capital charge.
There was a sharp difference by sex. The men were six to one for conviction, the women four to one for acquittal. By Saturday, the voting was unanimous for conviction, but it took two more days before those favoring a second-degree conviction won over those holding out for the lesser charge of manslaughter.
Sheppard spent Christmas in county jail. On Jan. 7 his mother left a note for Dr. Steve: "I just can't go on. ... Thanks for everything." They found her with a bullet in her brain.
Eleven days later his father died of a hemorrhaging gastric ulcer. His sons were convinced it was caused by the worry of the previous six months.
Corrigan meanwhile worked on his brief asking a new trial. It was to be the first of a dozen unsuccessful attempts to overturn the verdict.
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As the millions who watched the O.J. Simpson trial on television are aware, high profile murder cases are full of mistakes by all involved. The U.S. Supreme Court listed numerous errors by Judge Blythin in overturning Sheppard's conviction in 1966, and the mistakes of the prosecution were evident after the second trial.
But, with 20/20 hindsight, it is clear the defense also made serious mistakes. The biggest appears to be its failure to have its own expert examine the murder house. In their books, Sheppard family members said that was because police refused to turn over the keys to the house until after the trial.
That's what Corrigan argued in his appeal, but the Court of Appeals noted that he had never asked for the right to conduct an examination. Prosecutors had been quoted in newspapers in early October saying they would allow such an examination if asked. Even if they had balked, the appeals court said, "it is inconceivable that a formal application to the presiding judge in the criminal branch of the Common Pleas Court would not have been granted."
Corrigan maintained such an examination would have had to be done under the eyes of the police, who would inform the prosecution what it turned up. But if the evidence favored the defendant, that would have been a small price to pay. And, as Paul Holmes noted in his 1961 book, "this too might have been cured through an appeal to the courts for impartial supervision."
When Dr. Paul Kirk, a nationally known criminologist, was allowed in the house after Sheppard's conviction, he discovered evidence pointing to Sheppard's innocence that the second Sheppard jury, 12 years later, found convincing.
The first jury was split evenly on its first ballot and came close to hanging before returning a verdict. Had it heard Kirk's testimony — and his list of tests the coroner's office could have made but didn't — the results might have been different.
Corrigan also failed to sufficiently challenge Dr. Gerber's claim that the bloody imprint on Marilyn's pillow appeared to be from a surgical instrument. At the later trial Gerber was forced to admit he could not produce any surgical instrument which might have caused such an imprint.
Corrigan's advice to Sheppard not to take a lie detector test was legally sound, even though it would have abated the outcry against him had he passed and could not have been used in court against him if he failed. But, having already fueled public suspicion by rejecting the test, why did he allow Sheppard to testify at the inquest?
He could have denounced it as a circus — as the Supreme Court was later to do — and announced he was ordering his client to assert his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.
Sheppard's perjury at the inquest — denying his affair with Susan Hayes — was the most damning event of the summer. As one newspaperman later observed, Sheppard was tried for murder and convicted of adultery.
Public opinion is not supposed to be a factor in a trial, but in the Sheppard case it clearly was, and Corrigan failed to speak up forcefully for his client. Ironically, Sheppard himself got sympathetic treatment in his few newspaper interviews.
But Dr. Steve, who alienated reporters, largely kept him from the press. Sheppard quickly lost the battle in the court of public opinion, which reached its own verdict long before the trial. An able lawyer, Corrigan never learned how to use the media.
That's a criticism nobody ever made of the lawyer who was to succeed him. But then, in 1954 F. Lee Bailey was 21 years old and flying fighter planes for the Marines.