by Paul Collins
Weeks’s presence was a quiet and subdued one—not least because in a capital trial, it was still the custom to not let the accused testify, as their hopeless bias against conviction created a “disqualification of interest.” Until 1701, British and American defendants didn’t even have the right to counsel or to call witnesses, because holding trials was considered necessary only when there was already overwhelming proof of wrongdoing. That Weeks could retain the talents of Hamilton, Burr, and Livingston, and call witnesses on his own behalf, was the great advance of the eighteenth century. But even now, at the dawn of nineteenth century, defendants remained almost mute during their trial. One of the few times Weeks could speak was during jury selection.
“Simon Schermerhorn!” the clerk called out.
Here.
“William Miller!”
Here.
One by one, Coleman called out thirty-four members of the jury pool, and then turned to the accused.
“Levi Weeks, prisoner at the bar, hold up your right hand,” he commanded. Weeks placed his left hand on the court’s Bible and raised his right; in the tense silence there was the scratching of pencils in the gallery as competing local hacks took rapid notes, hoping to beat the clerk himself to writing the story that was about to unfold.
“Hearken to what is said to you,” Coleman continued. “These good men who have last been called, and who do now appear, are those who are to pass between the people of the State of New-York, and you, upon your Trial of Life and Death. If, therefore, you will challenge them, your time to challenge is as they come up to the book to be sworn, and before they are sworn, you will be heard.”
The clerk steadily called up each potential juror to the stand: Garrit Storm. Robert Lylburn. George Scriba.
Weeks immediately cut some of the jurors short as their names were called out: They are not fit to judge me. So many New Yorkers had already spoken publicly against him that soon nearly a dozen rejects were sent back. Others excused themselves even as they walked up to the bar.
I am a Friend, they explained, and the judge waved them off—for he knew they were not friends of the accused, but rather members of the Society of Friends—and thus forbidden by the tenets of Quakerism from swearing of oaths, let alone accepting a trial that involved capital punishment. Just one Quaker, James Hunt, was willing to bend his theology.
Place your hand upon the book, the clerk told Hunt.
“Juror, look upon the Prisoner; Prisoner, look upon the Juror.”
The two men locked eyes.
Observing carefully from the defense table, Burr could only be pleased by this choice: Hunt was an old Republican running mate of his, and they’d served in the assembly together. So had the father of juror Garrit Storm. Another juror, Robert Lylburn, was a tobacco and beeswax merchant best known for organizing local Irishmen for the Republicans.
And yet above all, these jurors were reasonable businessmen: Of the twelve men agreed upon, all were merchants, grocers, or provisioners. Not only did the jury box contain John Rathbone—a merchant of everything from shawls to gunpowder, who maintained what was admiringly described as “immense operations” in salt manufacturing—it also contained a former president of the city’s chamber of commerce, Boss Walton, known as a lavishly generous and civic-minded “Prince of Merchants.” The overwhelmingly mercantile jury was no coincidence. Jurors had to be men between the ages of twenty-one and sixty, and be taxpaying landowners holding property worth at least $250—nearly a year’s wages for a common laborer. The jury box was what women and the poor faced, not what they sat in.
And so the jury, like everything else in the room, was a curiously and intimately local affair. Not only did jurors cross paths with the contestants of the trial, they also knew one another well: Just a few years earlier, James Hunt and his fellow juror Jasper Ward had even run a grocery store together.
Swear, the clerk said to Hunt, “You shall well and truly try, and true deliverance make, between the People of the State of New-York, and Levi Weeks, and a true verdict give according to evidence, so help you God.”
Levi looked at the grocer who would help to decide his fate. The day before, the man had been judging apples and weighing plugs of tobacco.
So help me God, the juror said.
GENERAL HAMILTON considered his carefully written notes. It was his habit to divide his papers into two columns, the left side with the points of his case, and the right with the legal precedents and citations. Hale’s Plea of the Crown—yes, that would come into play. For all the new laws and rights that Hamilton’s generation had been developing for this new country, he and his fellow lawyers were still deeply dependent on the usages of the colonial era and the old country. A country scarcely a decade old had few legal precedents to draw on, so if there was one place where the king and the crown still received respectful mention in America, it was in its courtrooms.
Hamilton had served the defense many times before, had some small experience with murder cases, and had even served alongside Burr in the past, but this—a murder defense with Burr? It was altogether unique. And yet for all the strangeness of the affair, many eyes in the courtroom were also upon the clerk. For Coleman to keep this patronage job would depend on the Federalists’ holding on to City Hall in the next election, of course—Colonel Burr, sitting with his usual unnerving calm, would try to sweep Coleman and the rest out at the first opportunity. But for now, Hamilton’s young protégé was confidently holding forth in the center of the courtroom.
“Gentlemen of the Jury,” the clerk began. “The prisoner at the bar stands indicted in the words following, to wit.”
Coleman peered down at the densely written parchment. The indictment, as was the custom, was a serpentine tangle of flawlessly penned, endlessly redundant clauses.
The Jurors and the People of the State of New-York, in and for the city and county of New-York, on their oath present that LEVI WEEKS, late of the seventh ward, of the city of New-York, in the county of New-York, labourer, not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil, on the 22nd day of December, in the year of our Lord 1799, with force and arms at the ward foresaid, in and upon one GULIELMA SANDS, in the Peace of God, and of the said people then and there being, feloniously, willfully, and of his malice afterthought, did make an assault, and that the said Levi Weeks, then and there feloniously, willfully, and of his malice afterthought, did take the said Gulielma Sands into both the hands of him the said Levi Weeks, and did cast, throw, and push the said Gulielma Sands, into a certain well there situated, wherein there was a great quantity of water …
Coleman took a breath—for the first sentence was not yet even finished.
… by means of which said casting, throwing, and pushing, of the said Gulielma Sands into the well aforesaid, by the said Levi Weeks, in the form aforesaid, the said Gulielma Sands, in the well aforesaid, with the water aforesaid, was then and there choked, suffocated, and drowned; of which said choking, suffocating, and drowning, the said Gulielma Sands, then and there instantly died.
A second sentence, at twice the length, went on to say much the same as the first, and in nearly the same words. After carefully navigating through this ornamental maze of verbiage, Coleman turned to the jury and addressed them more plainly—as fellow citizens and neighbors, all puzzling over a mysterious crime.
“Upon this indictment the prisoner at the bar hath been arraigned,” he explained gently. “And on his arraignment, hath pleaded not guilty. Your charge is, gentlemen, to enquire whether the prisoner at the bar is guilty or not.”
Out in the hallways the scores of witnesses awaited; inside, the young carpenter sat ready for his fate.
“So sit together,” Coleman commanded the jury, “and hear your evidence.”
BEFORE HE BEGAN HIS OPENING ARGUMENTS, THE ASSISTANT ATTORNEY general pondered the eminences at the defense table. Just a few months back, Colden had personally investigated and successfully prosecuted H
amilton’s libel action against local printer David Frothingham—and it was Brockholst Livingston that he’d prevailed over. Aaron Burr was no stranger to Colden, either: As a lawyer for the prosecutor’s own father, Burr helped save Colden land from anti-Loyalist seizures after the war.
Today, though, all three men were arrayed against him.
“The prisoner has thought it necessary for his defense, to employ so many advocates distinguished for their eloquence and abilities—so vastly my superiors in learning, experience and professional rank,” the young prosecutor began, as eyes turned toward the defense table. “But gentlemen, as a public prosecutor, I think I ought to do no more than offer you in its proper order, all the testimony the case affords, drawn from witnesses. All that they know—the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
The wooden floors of the courtroom echoed the footsteps of the prosecutor.
“Levi Weeks, the prisoner at the bar, is indicted for the murder of Gulielma Sands. He is a young man of reputable connections, and for aught we know, till he was charged with this crime, of irreproachable character.”
For spectators peering at the defendant, that seemed fair enough—Weeks was a handsome fellow, a hard worker, a man with an honest face.
“His appearance interested us greatly in his favor,” one spectator mused. “We waited with anxiety for the testimony.” They would not have to wait for long—and, Colden warned, it would be damning, for the carpenter’s gentle appearance was deceiving.
“He gained the affections of those who are now to appear against him as witnesses on the trial for his life. The deceased was a young girl, who till her fatal acquaintance with the prisoner, was virtuous and modest—always of a cheerful disposition, and lively manners, though of a delicate constitution. We expect to prove to you that the prisoner won her affections, and that her virtue fell a sacrifice to his assiduity; that after a long period of criminal intercourse between them, he deluded her from the house of her protector under a pretense of marrying her, and carried her away to a well in the suburbs of the city, and …”
Colden stopped for a moment—“as if overpowered with his emotions,” the court clerk noted—and then gathered himself again.
“No wonder, gentlemen, that my mind shudders at the picture here drawn, and requires a moment to recollect myself,” he added weakly. The outrage over the ads placed by Weeks’s defenders—the claims that Elma had committed suicide—then revived his indignant anger.
“I will not say what may be your verdict,” Colden told the hushed room. “But I will venture to assert that not one of you or any man who hears this cause, shall doubt that the unfortunate young creature who was found dead in the Manhattan Well—was most barbarously murdered.”
THE FIRST witness called was Elma’s cousin, Catharine Ring—the woman in charge of the boardinghouse itself. As a Quaker who refused oath taking, she solemnly affirmed her presence in the court. There was another presence, though, that was more problematic.
Your honor, that man needs to leave the room.
The proceedings halted; the defense was demanding that Elias Ring leave the courtroom during his wife’s testimony. In the searching looks of the crowd at the witnesses, the unspoken question hung over the moment: Why did Levi distrust Mr. Ring?
“You have a right to it, of course,” Judge Lansing replied. Elias was briskly escorted out of the courtroom by the bailiffs.
Composing herself after the room had quieted down again, Mrs. Ring began her tale. She was, she explained, twenty-seven years old—just five years older than Elma—and “I regarded her as a sister.
“In July last, Levi Weeks came to board in our family, soon after which he began to pay attention to Margaret Clark, till about the 28th of the 8th month, when she went in the country.” Their former boarder Margaret suddenly found herself under the glare of onlookers’ attentions, but Mrs. Ring pressed on. “About two days after her absence, Gulielma Sands asked me—”
Objection!
Colden’s first witness had been stopped by Weeks’s team scarcely two sentences into her testimony; Mrs. Ring, they insisted, was relating hearsay. Colden was ready for it: He pulled out his notes to announce a whole a series of legal precedents for use of a murder victim’s speech, from State Trials and Leach’s Cases to Skinner’s Reports.
Wrong, the defense shot back. Has Mr. Colden actually read those cases?
Brockholst Livingston, reaching across the table for a copy of Leach’s Cases in Crown Law, thumbed through to one of the cases Colden cited. It was the trial of one William Woodcock, accused in 1789 of beating his wife to death in a London lane. Her dying accusation against the man had been taken down—but not under oath, not by a jury, and with the wife herself apparently oblivious to just how near death she was.
“His Lordship,” Livingston read from the thick quarto volume, “then left it with the jury to consider, whether the deceased was not in fact under the apprehension of death; and said, that if they were under admission that she was, then the declaration were admissible; but that if they were of a contrary opinion, they were not admissible.”
Elma Ring was hardly dying back in July 1799; indeed, she was full of life. Far from backing his case, Colden had just cited one that contradicted it. Before the prosecutor could respond, Aaron Burr leaped in: Was the prosecutor aware that another case he’d cited was, in fact, in a Scottish court—a different legal system—and not an authority for the United States? Or that in the Woodcock case—Very well, the judge announced. Please proceed, Mrs. Ring, without resort to hearsay.
“Levi became very attentive to Elma, to whom I mentioned it, and she did not deny it,” she continued, choosing her words carefully. “After my return I paid strict attention to their conduct, and saw an appearance of mutual attachment, but nothing improper. He was frequently in the room when she was sick. One—”
Objection! … What’s he doing here?
The defense pointed into the crowd behind Mrs. Ring. There stood Elias Ring, who had crept back into the courtroom to eavesdrop on his wife’s testimony.
Mind your behavior, sir, the judge snapped. Bailiff, you may escort him out again.
Chastened on behalf of her own husband, Mrs. Ring began her testimony again.
“Not a day passed but convinced me more and more that he was paying attentions to her,” she insisted. “I often found them sitting and standing together, and once in particular I found them sitting together on her bed.”
It was not quite the decorous behavior expected in a prospective Quaker—“I always thought her disposition rather too gay for a Friend,” Mrs. Ring said primly—and on December 22, 1799, she found her niece seeming “much pleased” about something. The boardinghouse mistress recalled the evening carefully for the jury: Elma borrowing clothes and her neighbor’s muff to get dressed to go out, and Levi limping back, his knee bandaged, from his early evening visit to his brother’s house. Just after Levi returned home, she recalled, “I heard the clock strike eight”—and then, after retiring to her room with Mr. Ring, she heard Levi and Elma leave again within ten minutes.
Yes—she was certain that was what she had heard: two sets of footfalls coming down the stairs, and the voices of Levi and Elma whispering in the hall outside her room.
“Mrs. Ring.” Prosecutor Colden dramatically unrolled an architect’s plan of the 208 Greenwich boardinghouse and exhibited it to the court. “What kind of staircase is it?”
“It is a hollow, closed staircase.”
“Would not a person coming down such,” he ventured, “make a considerable noise?”
“Any person certainly would.”
The jury examined the drawing, seeing just how close in proximity Mrs. Ring’s eavesdropping had been.
“How near is your door to the stairs?” Colden asked.
“It opens against them.”
“How far is it from the foot of the stairs to the outer door?”
“Not more than four feet.”
“I said, Stop, Levi, this matter has become so serious, I can stand it no longer.” And at that moment, she claimed, she’d confronted Levi with the very secret that Elma had revealed on the day she disappeared: “She came down stairs after being with thee, and told me, that night at eight o’clock you were going to be married.”
All the suspicion, all the anger of the city, had hinged on this one recollection.
“He turned pale,” Mrs. Ring continued, “trembled to a great degree—and began to cry, clasping his hands together, cried out—I’m ruined! I’m undone forever, unless she appears to clear me.”
In the shocked silence, a droll inquiry came from the defense table: Elma said all kinds of things, didn’t she? Hadn’t Mrs. Ring also heard Elma threaten to overdose on laudanum? The very hint of suicide had deeply upset the Rings before—the charge blackened Elma’s memory with a grievous sin—and now the raw emotion welled back up again.
“Why Levi! How can thee say so?” she scolded. Being sick so often, Elma easily could have overdosed on opium tincture—“it was always easy for her to get that”—and to have her idle jest over a bottle of medicine perverted like this by Hamilton and Burr in the courtroom was infuriating to Mrs. Ring.
“It don’t bear the weight of a … single … straw with me,” the grieving witness sputtered, and she turned her baleful stare upon the prisoner—on the man who once was to have married into her own family.
“Levi,” she spat, “I shudder to think I ever indulged a favorable thought of thee.”