WORLDVIEW:The US courts have an unfailing ability to lift the veil on bizarre aspects of American life, writes PATRICK SMYTH
IT’S NOT as if the case was not serious. The jury had pronounced the death penalty on Marcus Wellons for the 1989 rape and murder of a 15-year-old in Atlanta.
Then, it appears, in a moment of whimsy, the same jury presented the judge with an “edible chocolate penis” and the bailiff with a pair of chocolate breasts. The judge did not report the gifts, and Wellons’s lawyers learned about them only when preparing his appeal.
On Tuesday a majority of the US supreme court considered the circumstances sufficiently bizarre to order the US court of appeals for the 11th Circuit to re-examine the trial. “From beginning to end,” the supreme court insisted, “judicial proceedings conducted for the purpose of deciding whether a defendant shall be put to death must be conducted with dignity and respect.”
Quite right too.
There is something glorious about the American courts. All life is there. While a correspondent in Washington, I confess I developed an addiction that trumped even politics – to the courts and their presentation on the screen, whether To Kill a Mockingbirdor 12 Angry Men, or the wilder fantasies of LA Lawand Law and Order.Hardly a week passed without some district court giving me a quirky story that lifted a veil on a bizarre aspect of American life, or without the Supreme Court judges – we felt we knew them all individually – pronouncing on one of the great issues that divided the nation, from the death penalty to church-state relations.
Coming up to Christmas that impulse took me to London to the Old Vic production of Inherit the Wind, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee's play based on the 1925 so-called Monkey Trial in which young Tennessee teacher, John Scopes, was arraigned for instructing children in the ideas of Charles Darwin.
In the 1960 film, Spencer Tracy played the thinly disguised crusading liberal lawyer Clarence Darrow, a part taken on triumphantly in London by Kevin Spacey. His courtroom demolition of tub-thumping demagogue, William Jennings Bryan, a Biblical literalist, was a classic.
Not least, Spacey’s timing. Informed that the world was created by God on October 23rd, 4004 BC, at 9am, Spacey gave a moment of silent, apparently serious consideration to the notion, before casually and devastatingly responding: “Would that be Eastern Standard Time?”
And now life trumps art once again in the small town of Mount Vernon, Ohio – home to 15,000 people, 30 churches and an evangelical university – where we have, in the best Hollywood tradition, “Son of Scopes”. Another chapter in the unending American culture war.
School board hearings to consider the sacking of science teacher John Freshwater, accused of burning a cross on to the arms of two of his students and this time of teaching creationism, have bitterly divided a community.
The hearing and associated legal motions have lasted over a year, produced 5,000 pages of transcripts, 30 days of oral testimony, and cost the board more than half a million dollars. Freshwater has launched a federal suit seeking $1 million in damages.
“Freshwater’s supporters want to make this into a new and reverse version of the Scopes trial,” says David Millstone, the lawyer for the Mount Vernon Board of Education. “We see this as a basic issue about students having a constitutional right to be free from religious indoctrination in the public schools.”
Freshwater (53), a married father of three, claims he did not mean to burn a cross on any student’s arm. He says he intended just to leave a temporary X on the skin using a device called a Tesla coil during a science demonstration. He says he’d done it, with no complaints, hundreds of times as a teacher.
He had also refused an order by his principal to remove a Bible from his classroom desk and is alleged to have broken rules by participating in prayer meetings by athletes on school premises. In April 2008, he called a press conference in the town square to say that while willing to take down religious posters from his classroom he draws the line at removing his Bible.
Students held a “bring your Bible to school” day.
In testimony, supporters said he had consistently received positive evaluations and won teacher awards at least twice. But former colleagues tell a different story. One said she consistently had to re-teach evolution to his students because they did not master the basics. Another, that he told students they should not always take science as fact, citing as an example a study that posited the possibility of a gene for homosexuality.
Freshwater’s pastor, Don Matolyak, complains to the New York Times that the criticism of Freshwater is part of a larger trend toward bigotry against Christians. “If he had a Koran on his desk, he’d be fine and no one would say a word to him . . . If he had Origin of Species on his desk, they would celebrate that.”
Can’t wait for the mini-series.