| Genres: | Documentary |
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On Trial for Murder: America’s Most Famous Murder Trials takes you inside the courtrooms and uncovers the stories of 10 of the most well-known trials since the turn of the 20th century.
For this riveting foray into criminal law, your guide is Professor Douglas O. Linder, the Elmer Powell Peer Professor of Law at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law.
Step back to the Gilded Age in New York City, to a night in 1906 at Madison Square Garden, when millionaire Harry Thaw murdered the man who defiled his wife, starlet Evelyn Nesbit, years earlier. What appears to be a clearcut case of cold-blooded murder devolved into a sensational trial over the novel “insanity defense.”
Your next stop is Western Idaho, where class conflicts between the miners’ union and the government turned deadly when a planted bomb killed former governor Frank Steunenberg. When Pinkerton investigator James McParland extracted a confession from the bomber, the stage was set to put union leader William “Big Bill” Haywood on trial.
Travel south to Atlanta, where in 1913 Jewish businessman Leo Frank went on trial for allegedly murdering a teenage girl in his factory. Complicating the narrative was an eyewitness who changed his story, as well as investigators plagued by confirmation bias, and Southern racial dynamics that made an honest trial all but impossible.
Do juries always get it right? Can public opinion sway the results? The infamous Sacco and Vanzetti trial over a deadly robbery brings these questions to the fore. This lecture takes you into the tumultuous 1920s, where issues of social class, race, and xenophobia created a spectacle around the trial of two Italian Americans.
Not all crimes are solved. The death of numerous Osage tribe members in Oklahoma—known today as the “Killings of the Flower Moon”—continues to captivate our imaginations. Dive into a world of oil money, inheritance, and mass murder with this survey of just one investigation into a sequence of homicides.
A woman alleges that she was assaulted on her way home one night, but the story of a gang assault doesn’t add up. Then, a murder committed out of vengeance. Delve into a three-act story of Tommie Massie, his wife Thalia, and the last chapter in the courtroom career of Clarence Darrow, “America’s greatest defense attorney,” that changed the politics of Hawaii forever.
